by Patty Jansen
“From Project Charon, right?”
Well, shit. “I worked there, but it’s a very long time ago.” She did not like the way this was going.
“You worked under Dexter Freeman?”
She cringed. “He was my husband, but if you know that much about me, I’m sure you know that also.”
Rex was watching with wide eyes. Tina rarely spoke about his father. She just didn’t see the point of transferring her bitter feelings about him onto her son, even if Dexter gave no intention of wanting any contact with Rex.
Finn shook his head. “It’s such a pity.”
Tina’s heart jumped. “What is? What happened?”
He frowned at her. “You don’t know?”
"I left rather suddenly. I have not kept in contact." That was putting it mildly.
He gave her a strange look. "The project was closed down," he said.
"Really? Why?" Tina felt she already knew why, but she wanted to hear it from his mouth: they took too many risks and something went wrong. People were killed.
"No official explanation was given, but the Force cordoned off the sector, and then spent an extraordinary amount of effort and money chasing a couple of pirate ships. The rumours have it that a band of pirates managed to steal something from the project, but none of us know for certain. This is all public rumour, by the way. You should be able to read about it on the news channels, if you want."
Well, that was not at all what she expected to hear. And it sounded, kind of… stupid, to be honest.
"So you're saying that somehow some pirates managed to break into the project and steal something valuable from the military? Something so valuable that they're spending a lot of effort chasing after it?" If true, which she doubted, it would be a severe embarrassment. The Perseus Agency and especially Project Charon was the most secure and secretive facility in the Federacy Force.
Finn snorted. “That was pretty much how it went. Of course the pirates didn’t like the Federacy’s sudden interest in them and started to organise themselves in groups in order to survive and fight back. They formed an ever-increasing fleet that has been growing ever since. They have grown into a formidable force that the Federacy now has to contend with. The conflict has gone much further than retrieving what was stolen."
Wait—conflict? With pirates? And it all had to do with Project Charon? Tina remembered hearing about the Federacy fighting pirates on the news channel she happened to listen to while in the care home at Gandama. She couldn’t imagine pirates making any kind of impression on the Federacy Force.
“What did they steal? Does anyone know? Did they get it?”
“No one knows, but it seems unlikely there was a resolution, because there has been no change in our orders. Mind you, they don’t tell us anything in the first place.”
“So the pirate story could be nonsense?”
“It’s what we heard from people who were on the ships who got to chase pirates, who were a lot of people. No one told us what the pirates had done beyond trespassed in a prohibited area.”
Tina laughed. That was such standard vague Federacy language for things like this.
Finn laughed, too. “I know, right? A lot of people speculated about reasons that they kept talking about pirates. The Federacy never liked pirates so it might be a way to keep them quiet.”
Few people liked pirates, but there had to have been a good reason to go after them. The Federacy had signed all the human rights agreements, and never allowed anyone to forget that.
"These pirates, who are they? Do we know names? I presume they come from established worlds. Do they operate on planets as well?"
“It seems likely. They call themselves the Brothers of Anarchy. They have leaders, no doubt, but none of us know who they are. They tend to operate in smaller cells and each of them has different aims. I dare say that some of them can be quite law abiding and interested in trade."
"So that’s what you're doing here with the ship? Protecting the station from pirates?"
He grinned. "That’s the official line. As usual, and as you will know, the Federacy Force does not pass up an opportunity to increase their size and influence."
Yes, Tina knew that. Even Jake Monterra’s letters about employment now started to make sense. “The Federacy is officially expanding its influence into this area under the guise of chasing pirates?” Of course they would like to hire an employee who didn’t require a massive amount of training, who already lived locally.
"They’re trying to push into areas where they’ve not been active recently, to make sure that the eligible young people sign up for the Force rather than join the pirate army."
“Are the pirates recruiting?”
“If they are, they’re likely to use alternate methods of doing it that few people know about. So we’re doing it openly to prevent pirates getting a foothold.”
Tina thought of the young people who had been on the bus to Peris City with her. “You said that Project Charon was closed. What happened to the Perseus Agency and Project Charon?”
"The agency is still going. The project was closed down, the sector was cordoned off and is a no-go zone at the moment. They’re still working on what to do with Pandana, since it is constantly under attack from pirates. I don't know what happened to the infrastructure that was part of the project. I suspect that the small research station is still there, or has been towed somewhere else where the Federacy can use it."
She knew that station inside and out. She had lived there for the best part of six years. "What about the people who lived there?" She couldn't bring herself to name Dexter and Evelle, but for some reason, after fifteen years, she worried about them. About Dexter because she didn’t want to run into him, and about Evelle because she’d been avoiding Tina, not answering her correspondence, and she was her daughter, after all. Evelle probably hadn’t been to Charon for a long time, but it was where Tina planned to start looking, when she was ready to face the nest of hornets that was Evelle.
"Most of the personnel got relocated to different divisions. If there was a research opportunity for them to work, they went there but, in reality, most of them went into the Flight Force."
A chill went over Tina's back. "Do you have any of them on board your ship?" She didn’t want to run into anyone familiar when she didn't expect it.
"Probably a few. I don’t know anyone in particular."
They ate for a while in silence.
During the conversation Rex had been silently listening. He now met Tina's eyes. It was hard to figure out what he was thinking. He had never shown much interest in his father. He knew about the existence of his sister, but since that question about whether she had been born with arms and legs had been answered in the affirmative, he hadn’t shown much interest in her, especially since Tina couldn’t describe her in any other way than “difficult to get on with” in every aspect.
But he had to be thinking something about them. What was it with these teenage boys and their deep thoughts?
They finished their meal talking about the facilities at Kelso Station. Finn was much more familiar with them than her outdated map. He said not to bother with any of the shops in the main commercial area. If they wanted to buy something, it was much better to go to the trading room where goods and services were traded at fair prices between the customers who actually used them.
"Thanks for that information," Tina said. "In all honesty, I’m here to sell an old ship that I’ve had moored here for a long time, and I probably should have sold a long time ago but I just couldn't be bothered. I need some money back on the planet for my business, and if you know of someone who wants to buy a ship, I've got one for them."
"You have a ship?" Finn said. His eyes widened. “What model?”
“It’s only a GenTrac Omega-6, about thirty years old. It was a decent solid thing but I haven't used it for a long time. There are likely to be a few things wrong with it.”
“Those are very solid ships. They don’t ma
ke them like that anymore. You’re unlikely to find anything major wrong with it.”
“I just need to clean it and fix it up so I can sell it.”
"You’ll find plenty of customers," Finn said. "A lot of people are scared of pirates and hate the thought of being stuck on one world or a tin can like the station."
"Then I might be lucky for once."
After they finished their meal, Tina and Rex went back to the hotel room, where Tina had to deal with washing Rex, a job she had neglected over the past day or so. In places, his skin was going red from being sweaty in the harness too long.
She would have to look after him better.
Rex asked to use his entertainment system for a bit, so she propped him up in bed facing the screen that he controlled with movements of his eyes while she ducked into the shower.
When she finished, he’d fallen asleep.
Tina eased him off the pillow and went to turn off the screen. He hadn’t been watching a movie, as she’d assumed, but studying a wire model of the GenTrac Omega-6, with the controls and navigation units magnified.
Tina sat on the couch in the corner. She idly paged through pictures of her cactuses, wishing she were back home. She opened her pack and took out her armoured jacket, unrolled it and looked at the array of seeds stuck to the fabric. The station’s quarantine office would have a fit if they knew they were here, but rolled inside the jacket, they had escaped detection. Hopefully the cactuses were coping. Hopefully no one had found them.
Hopefully no one had yet set fire to the shop.
She looked through the station’s port log, or the part that was public. The SS Stavanger was mentioned there, and it listed a crewmember under the name Flight Engineer F. Kaspari.
She then searched for the Kaspari name, and found why the name rang a bell with her. The Kaspari family owned a huge stake in the Olympus settlement, an industrial complex on the world of Olympus. Tina had never been there, but she’d heard many rumours about the money and influence that members of the family sought to buy.
She was never terribly interested in gossip, but her search uncovered sordid stories of the family's patriarch George, who was married four times and had seven children by four different wives. The children were all in conflict with each other and their respective mothers. George had a brother called Michael, and he had been investigated for corruption, most notably under the serious charge of trying to buy influence into the Federacy assembly, headquartered on Olympus, that oversaw the Federacy’s administrative processes. They were a dry group of people that no one worried much about, but who wielded enormous economic power, even if it was done mostly anonymously.
Michael Kaspari was suspected of having tried to bribe one of the assembly members.
She looked around the family tree, and found a number of people in the younger generation who were called Finn.
One of them was clearly a child, because the birthdate was given, but about another, not much detail was given. This was a son of George’s second oldest child with his first wife.
She wondered if that was the Finn Kaspari she had met, or whether it was a common name.
And then she wondered why such an influential family would find any benefit in sending a son to do a fairly low job on a large but ordinary warship in an out-of-the-way section of the galaxy.
On second thoughts, probably a lot of people were called Finn Kaspari.
She looked up photos of the fabled Kaspari family members, and did not see any obvious similarities between them and the man she had met. There was one photo of the entire family at some sort of gathering, and there were a lot of children in the picture, but they were not all named.
At any rate, why should she care? She had a ship to sell and a business to get back to.
Chapter Seventeen
But Finn’s words disturbed her more than she wanted to admit. Project Charon had been closed down, and he might be content not knowing why, but she definitely wasn’t.
She searched for the information and found that it was as Finn had said. The reason for the closure had not been given, but the regular Federacy Force had swept in with their big ships and had wreaked havoc on a fleet of private ships in the area, widely assumed to be a pirate band.
Pandana, the nearby civilian station where she’d bought her ship, was under quarantine.
Fancy that. So much had changed. She also found out that, back in her day, it had been okay to call pirates Freerangers, but these days, that was a loaded term, because it was what the pirates called themselves with pride. They were free of the tyranny of Federacy rule.
In the morning at breakfast, she told Rex that she was going to do some boring administrative jobs and that he was free to watch some movies until she came back.
“Where are you going?”
“I need to go to some offices to do paperwork.”
“Can’t I come?”
“You’d find it really boring.”
“Oh, okay.” He sat back on the bed, looking a bit disappointed.
She promised she’d be back soon.
Walking through the station without Rex was much quicker. Because his harness was so heavy, he was also quite slow and often needed to wait until people moved out of the way. She could take the stairs, rather than having to wait for the lift, or wait for Rex to slowly lumber up the stairs. She felt a little guilty about thinking about him this way, but it was probably best to do these boring jobs by herself.
But she hadn’t gone far when she had the feeling that someone was following her.
At least two men walked behind her who stopped when she stopped, when she observed them in the reflections of shop windows. Both were quite tall, wore dark nondescript clothing. One of them wore a fake pirate belt as fashion accessory. The metal studs and eyelets glittered in the light, but nothing hung from them. One had short hair, balding on top, and the other had long black hair tied in a ponytail. He also had a goatee.
Tina was baffled why anyone would follow her. Were they people who had seen her looking at the gun in the pawnshop? Were they just random thugs? Did they, like Finn, know who she was?
She turned around and walked the other way, only to see the two men disappear into a shop before she reached them.
Then she went around a corner and walked through another passage parallel to the commercial centre.
Kelso Station wasn’t big enough for commercial areas multiple blocks deep, so this second passage was much quieter.
The men did not follow. Tina kept looking over her shoulders, but they had probably taken some sort of shortcut and would be reappearing in front of her any moment. She was looking so much over her shoulder that she didn't see the man who came out from one of the doorways. She almost crashed into him.
"Oh, sorry," she started saying, but then the man exclaimed, "Tina Freeman!"
She stared at the man.
He had sandy hair, blue eyes, and wore a uniform with a Kelso Station Authority emblem on the chest.
She didn't think she knew any people who worked here. But his face was vaguely familiar.
"You received my message?" he asked.
Tina was about to ask which message when it dawned on her. "Jake Monterra?"
My, he had gotten quite a bit older. When he worked in the lab for her, he had been a skinny young man, a student, assigned to her by the Perseus Agency as a brilliant new recruit. But he had been shy, never saying much and fearful in the face of other people who knew so much more than him.
“What a coincidence that I bump into you right outside my office. I didn’t know you were here. You should have replied that you were coming, and I would have given you a tour.”
"I have some matters to attend to," Tina said. She didn't quite know where to begin with him. They had never been close. Yet meeting him here might be her ticket to get out of this sticky follower situation. If she could get him to accompany her to the commercial passage, any of her followers would give up, seeing his uniform.
"You're safe?" he asked.
What an odd question, given the situation. "Yes. Why not?" Did he know she was being followed? Had he arranged it?
“You were walking very fast. There are a lot of unsavoury types around in these corridors. They hang around here because we’re close to the employment office.”
“I’m just a bit lost. I followed some people down a set of stairs, I thought it was a shortcut to the shops, and now I’m not quite sure how to get there. Maybe you can show me while we talk."
"Sure."
They started walking slowly.
He asked what she was doing and Tina told him that she had only recently heard that Project Charon was closed.
“The person who told me didn’t know that much about it. What happened?”
“The usual. Someone in the head office decided they needed to make budget cuts.”
That was not at all the way she’d heard it. “What about the invasion of pirates?”
“Oh, that was after we moved out. The Federacy troops needed to come back to sweep the area, but there was nothing major and we weren’t affected.”
“It was quarantined, including Pandana?”
“That’s correct. Just to make sure that no one was selling contraband agency equipment.”
That was a very different story from the one she had heard, and she didn’t know how far to push for the truth, or if it was even her place to do so. If the project was closed, who really cared?
"It was sad the project closed down," Jake continued. "I found it quite difficult to find employment. I wasn’t yet graduated, and suddenly a lot of people were on the market looking for work. I was glad Kelso Station offered me a position, even though it’s obviously not in line with my studies."
"I hope you finished your degree since,” Tina said.
"Not yet, but I'm working on it." He smiled.
“After fifteen years?”
“It’s a busy job.”
“What work do you do at the station?”
“I work in quarantine, mostly with non-food animals and plants. Not so far removed from what we did at Charon. But what about you? You disappeared rather suddenly. One day I had a supervisor and the next I didn’t.”