Project Charon 1

by Patty Jansen

  Rex stared at the man until he disappeared inside the lift. Then he looked at Tina. It went without saying: that harness would be small enough to fit in between the wall and the bed. It might even be able to shuffle sideways.

  He said nothing, but she could see the longing in his eyes.

  He looked ancient and battered in his old-fashioned harness, and she finally realised that this was why people in the station had been staring at him. They’d been wondering why the piece wasn’t in a museum, considering him some sort of apparition from the past.

  The group of military personnel had gone from the reception area, and it was Tina's turn to go up to the counter.

  “What can I do for you?” the woman behind the desk asked.

  “Do you have a larger room?"

  "That will be difficult. As you can see we are very busy."

  "But my son doesn't fit in between the bed and the wall. I did tell you in my application that I needed extra room."

  For moment, the woman looked at the screen to find Tina's details.

  "That's right, you did. I assumed that he was wearing a normal exoskeleton."

  And she looked at Rex as if he was something from another dimension. “Is that part of a costume or something? Or are you trying to sell it to collectors?”

  Tina gave her the iciest stare she could manage. “The application didn’t have a box to enter dimensions for the space we needed. I assume that people wear different types of harnesses depending on their conditions.”

  "Oh. No, I didn’t realise that. I suppose we should change that.”

  Another curious look at Rex, because now, clearly, something was wrong with him much worse than what was wrong with all the other people who wore exoskeletons at Kelso Station.

  Great.

  But in the end, she allocated the pair of them a room on the ground floor, much bigger—and much more expensive—than the first room. It had two double beds, and a desk and a couch with a small table, a fridge filled with all kinds of snacks in bright colourful packaging, and a bathroom marginally bigger than the other. Washing Rex in that cubicle would still be an issue, but this was much better.

  “There is nothing wrong with me,” Rex said, standing in the middle of the room. “They’re talking about me like I have some sort of horrible disease.”

  “I know. It’s just that people need to feel sorry for you.”

  “I walk, I can run, I can jump, see?”

  He jumped up and down, landing with a heavy thud each time his metallic feet hit the ground.

  “Yes, yes, I know.”

  “No, you don’t know. Everything on this trip is about me, about how silly I look with all those babies, and how embarrassing it is that I don’t fit in seats. And that I’m wearing a costume and I should be in a museum.”

  “I did warn you.”

  “No, you told me about having to give me my injections. That’s about me again. About the disease that is me. Why don’t you just toss me out the airlock and be done with it?”

  “Just stop it, will you? I’m tired, I have no energy for this.”

  "Do you think about me? Do you think I have energy for this?"

  “Stop it. You can either shut up or I will send you home."

  That did the job. In the end, neither of them could change anything, so Rex fell quiet and said nothing, while Tina suggested they go and have a look around the place and maybe find something to eat.

  Something to eat was always good, and lately, she had noticed that Rex was crankier when he was hungry, so they left the room, went out to the hotel lobby, where it was still busy, and into the passage outside.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Compared with how Tina remembered it, the commercial area of the station was modern and quite spacious, with a tall ceiling and glass-fronted shops and a gallery level that overlooked the main passage.

  The lighting was diffuse and warm, made to resemble afternoon sunlight. Here and there stood plants in pots, although they certainly weren’t plants from the planet below.

  Tina and Rex wandered around the main commercial passage and its narrower side alleys with their quaint shops and service offices.

  So much had changed here that Tina barely recognised it. Back when she came here last, the commercial area had been old-fashioned, with claustrophobic, low ceilings and shops that operated in rooms that resembled freight storage areas.

  If she hadn't known any better she would have judged that she was in one of the larger stations.

  It was busy in the passage. The tourists from the planet were easy to pick. They were the people in the space overalls, because somewhere the rumour went around that one needed to wear one of those suits, so the tourist companies got their charges to wear them. They also walked slowly in groups, getting in the way of the locals who just wanted to do their shopping.

  Tina started noticing a lot of military people. They were in the bars and the restaurants, talking and laughing in groups. Even when they were not in uniform, they were obvious to Tina. She knew the way they stood and the way they talked to each other, and she recognised snatches of the jargon drifting through the general noise of the station.

  There were a lot more shops than last time, or at least during her last visit she hadn’t noticed them so much. When everything you needed was supplied to you by your employer, you didn't take notice of places where you could buy things.

  They were real shops, too, not the old-fashioned hole-in-the-wall where supplies of identical items lay stacked on shelves, like a utilitarian warehouse or supplies room. These were shops with display stands and clothes racks, with sales assistants and change rooms. There were electronics stores with flashing screens and even homewares stores that boasted everything for inside apartments or ships. We adapt all furniture to measure, one store sign proclaimed.

  "Hey, look at this," Rex said.

  He had stopped at a well-lit shop window, almost pressing his nose against the glass. On neat, clean shelves lay a collection of gadgets: mini consoles, comm devices, and a host of other things.

  Most of them sported worn edges, scrapes, or other signs of use, but there were also some newer devices of a type Tina had never seen. Strange and new technologies already being sold second hand. A whole generation of electronics had passed her by. On the surface of Cayelle, they just didn't get many of the technological advances that the rest of human settlement enjoyed.

  Rex said, “If I could get that screen, I could set it up so that you can watch who comes into the shop from the front door. Look, they even have the control unit."

  In a much less neat cabinet inside the shop lay an array of outdated computer equipment, the cables all jumbled up. The shelves behind it contained a variety of home entertainment units.

  "It's a pawn shop," she said.

  "What’s a pawn shop?"

  "It is where people who don't have money go to sell their possessions so that they can have money to pay their creditors."

  “You’re saying it like that’s a bad thing.”

  "No, it isn’t bad per se, but it's usually associated with a less than savoury crowd."

  His eyes widened. "You mean some of these things are stolen?"

  "Probably, or obtained in other dubious practices."

  She remembered stories about people being forced into debt and people preying on the estate of elderly people who had no family on the stations, so that when they died, all their possessions were taken and sold before the family knew about it. It happened a lot, especially to people who were not poor enough to have no possessions, but not rich enough to be able to afford a trust company.

  "I want to look inside," Rex said, having forgotten the quest to find something to eat.

  Tina wouldn’t normally want to be seen dead inside a shop like this but, on the other hand, she had no great plans for this afternoon, and looking around the shops was better than sitting in their room at the accommodation.

  So she went after Rex into the shop.

&nbs
p; It was cramped and crowded inside, and his harness did not fit in many of the narrow aisles. To help his customers, the shop owner had arranged all the interesting items around the main aisle that led up to the counter.

  While Rex looked at all the most recent models of the latest gadgets in glass-fronted cases, Tina walked through the narrower passageways. The shop owner stood at the counter at the very back, waiting to come out and bother either of them ready to be parted with some money. It looked like the shop had plenty of supplies, but was short on cashed-up buyers.

  Sure enough, the man came out into the main aisle and started chatting with Rex. He asked where he was from, what he was doing here, and Rex answered all the questions honourably, that he was here with his mother and that she was here for work. Somehow the man smelled money, even if Rex had none of his own and wasn't old enough to sign for purchases anyway.

  Tina wandered deeper into the shop. Soon enough, Rex would see how annoying these people could be. Let him learn his lesson in a less expensive way than she had learned it.

  The back aisles of the shop contained shelves with equipment that was not in glass cases. Sometimes they were household items, and sometimes they were electronic items from an age she remembered.

  At one time she had genuinely enjoyed working at the agency, because they did groundbreaking work. That was when she met Dexter, a handsome military officer in a spiffy uniform. In the pale bleakness of space, Dexter’s deep olive skin and dark hair had made a dashing appearance. His intelligence had been a refreshing change from the straight-laced military officers that she had spent most of her service years obeying.

  It was a trip down memory lane. She remembered having used a comm device like that one. It had been the one Dexter had used to propose to her when, surprisingly, she had fallen pregnant with Evelle.

  Rex’s voice cut through her thoughts. “Mum, come and have a look at this.”

  Tina had better rescue him from the shop owner.

  He was standing near the counter, where soft light emanated from a glass case. The shop’s owner stood behind the counter again. Likely he had figured that Rex wasn't old enough and he was wasting his time.

  In the case, on a spotlessly clean mirror, behind a spotlessly clean pane of glass, lay a gun. It looked brand new.

  It was a fairly powerful weapon of the Fireseed range. Not the old 301 that she had, but a newer 312 model, the type the Federacy would issue to recruits who had passed their weapons training. The barrel was smooth, without the typical Federacy Force engraving.

  The markings had probably been polished off.

  She wondered where the owner had gotten this weapon.

  Rex said, “He says it's 10,000 credits, and that he can't talk to me about it, because he can't sell to minors."

  "And he would be right. That is no thing for a boy your age." Tina tried to sound as casual as possible, as if finding a recent, very powerful gun in the pawn shop was a normal thing.

  “But isn’t it pretty?”

  “Guns can kill. They’re never pretty.”

  “Gah, you’re boring.”

  “I’d rather be boring than dead, or in prison.”

  Whatever this weapon was doing here, it was highly illegal, and she wanted nothing to do with it. She didn't even want to give the owner the impression that she knew it was illegal, or that she was even remotely interested in it.

  "Come," she said. “I’m hungry. Let’s find a place to have dinner." And she bundled him out of the shop.

  "But I still want to look inside," Rex protested.

  "That was an illegal gun, and he knew that I knew that it was an illegal gun. You do not talk or look like you're interested in illegal guns in a place like this."

  "But then why did he display it in such a nice case?"

  “Because he was asking a lot of money for it, and probably because he wanted to showcase it for his usual customers. People like us, honest people, don't come into shops like this.”

  She looked over her shoulder, but it was too busy to see if anyone had noticed them coming out of the shop. At any rate, they would be clearly visible on any security footage, for those who kept an eye on these things.

  She was already sorry that she had succumbed to Rex’s curiosity. Nothing but trouble came from interacting with these people.

  Chapter Sixteen

  For dinner, Rex insisted that he wanted to eat the space food that he had read so much about: space burgers, station loafers and dock signs.

  Tina hadn’t the heart to tell him that despite the ridiculous names, the food wasn’t all that great. The closest any of it had been to meat was the gloved hands of the poor person putting these delicacies together from recycled protein. Rex would probably regret it the next day, but she left it. The garishly coloured displays on restaurant menus hadn’t changed terribly much in the past fifteen years, even if the style had been updated.

  Whether you ordered soy burgers or sausages, the food was all fake. Even copious seasoning couldn’t mask the taste to Tina. It brought back unpleasant memories from the time when she was supposed to lead a secret life and wasn’t allowed to interact with people outside the agency. Only rarely did she come to Pandana Station—which was much like Kelso Station—while on duty.

  Most types of artificial food were not kind to Rex’s delicate digestive system, and of course space heroes never got nappy rash.

  They ate at a rather noisy and bright place with garishly coloured seats and smooth tables. Next door was a cute place with the theme of Cayelle: oranges and rust reds, a floor that looked to be made of dirt, and even some cactuses, standing in their pots like terrified rabbits. On closer inspection, Tina found them to be fake.

  Tina pointed it out to Rex, but he just snorted.

  He didn’t like Cayelle. He wanted something different. It was a feeling she knew well. Once, she had left her family. She’d liked to think they were horrible and boring, but her parents had raised four children in their home and were still happily together. Her brothers were all happily married with beautiful families and successful businesses. Only their ungrateful youngest child had taken off to space and never come back. Only their youngest child had made a mess of her marriage and family life, and even knew there was any such thing as fifteen-year-olds getting nappy rash in space.

  She was through with trying to put on a façade. She already missed Cayelle and the cactuses. She even missed the nighttime howling of the armadillos and the dust storms. It was familiar. This station belonged to a world that was no longer hers.

  The restaurant was full of military personnel. She explained to Rex that they were Federacy troops, and then she needed to explain that the Perseus Agency was the spying arm of the Federacy Forces. He wanted to know if she wore a uniform when she worked. He seemed disappointed when she said that she did, but that the uniform didn’t have a badge of a flying horse.

  “We were not supposed to be easy to recognise. We were meant to look like everyone else. It meant uniform when we were on duty, civilian clothes when not.”

  “Then who were you spying on?”

  “Mostly internally, other departments. Different worlds. Some of them were always trying to skim off materials and influence local politics.”

  “So you were spying on your own people?”

  “Pretty much. What else is there to spy on? Aliens?” A feeling of unease crept over her. “But, to be honest, I wasn’t in that division of the agency. We worked in the science division on a thing called Project Charon, an anomaly in space that we were studying.”

  “Like, an alien thing?” Rex’s eyes were wide.

  “Not really, but a phenomenon that people didn’t understand.”

  “Sorry, is this chair taken?” a young man asked. He wore a Federacy Force uniform, with Flight Division insignia and officer pips labelled Engineering. He was older than most other personnel hanging around and had a friendly, olive-skinned face and dark hair with flecks of grey at the temples.

  �
�No, it’s not. Sit down. We were about to finish,” Tina said.

  He sat. “You don’t have to leave for me. Finish your food.” He grinned. “I don’t bite.”

  That was so typical of flight troops. They were most likely to encounter civilians because they travelled the most, and had the mantra that they were the face of the Force drummed into them.

  “Are you expecting more people?” Tina asked. Usually these people came in groups.

  “No, it’s just me today. My mates were on duty.” He grinned again, in a most disarming way.

  But when all your mates were on duty and you couldn’t find anyone to go with, that was when you ate on board in the mess, right?

  He continued, “We’ve been in port for weeks, with no word on when we’re being sent out. The official term is patrolling the area. But I’m an engineer, so there’s not much to do. The situation on the ship is getting a bit tense, so I wanted to have a quiet meal by myself while meeting some of the locals.”

  He was either new to the Force—but then his ranking didn’t make sense—or genuinely curious, or—something else. Tina didn’t know what. Innocent? His attitude was almost naive.

  He held out his hand. “Anyway, my name is Finn. Flight Engineering Officer second class, SS Stavanger.” His nametag, which military personnel had to wear, said F. Kaspari. That rang some bells with her, but she couldn’t remember where she had heard the name before.

  But the ship, Tina knew. The Stavanger was one of the Norway series, likely the one she had seen when coming into the station. Those were serious warships with thousands of crew that were an entire ecosystem of their own. “Nice to meet you. I’m Tina Freeman and this is my son Rex.”

  His mouth fell open. “You’re kidding. You’re the Tina Freeman?”

  Heat rose to Tina’s cheeks. “I don’t know. I’m sure there are plenty of people with that name.”