Project Charon 1

by Patty Jansen

  In the extra folder, Tina found a personal message from Vasily to her.

  Dear Tina,

  By the time you read this I will probably be dead. I don’t have much time to record this, because the pirate fleet is following us and the Federacy forces are refusing to help. It’s a long story, and I hope you’ll hear it one day. I have time to tell you one story today, and that story isn’t it.

  I’ve included the recording of your talk in case you can use it to prove that you were concerned about the rift at an early stage. It proves that you are one of the few people who saw this coming and were prepared to speak up about it.

  Because there is another side to the story, as I discovered.

  It starts a number of years before you joined. Some people were aware of the material you so aptly called God’s putty and its unlimited regenerative potential. They applied to the Federacy to develop this material commercially. Their applications were full of positive opportunities. Imagine, they said, if you can grow human organs to replace diseased ones.

  But time and time again, they became frustrated because their applications were refused. I’ve personally never seen the communication, but I was led to believe the reasons for refusal were related to safety. Around the time you joined, a number of these people left—necessitating your appointment. Those who left took some of their research, against Federacy policies. They contacted private enterprises. They contacted ex-colleagues, offering huge amounts of cash.

  There was a transfer of material from the project to people outside the Federacy, now understood to have Freeranger or at least commercial interests.

  We traced the possible traitor back to a group of six of our people who attended a scientific meeting on Pandana. Dexter was one of those people. Others were Leon Ming, Bilal Hassad and Jake Monterra who started their own scientific supply company. All of them attended this scientific meeting at Pandana. We believe they passed the material onto someone who either paid them so that they could afford to start the company, or who promised to conduct further research that the agency was not going to perform.

  They were paid very well. Nothing more was said.

  Then things started to go wrong, with people, including you and me, questioning the continuous health issues at the research station. You repeated the earlier research without knowing, and got similar results. You raised the alarm. They ignored you.

  Why did they ignore you? Because there is still a huge financial interest tied up with the deal they allowed the commercial companies to sign.

  Even if all the reports we wrote all point in a worrying direction, they pretended it didn’t happen, because several of the top brass in the research division are making corrupt money out of this, and they’re afraid to have their cover blown.

  Meanwhile, thousands of people have become ill, but because they are pirates, no one cares.

  This is what we know about the spread of the condition: most of the time, it’s not infectious. The time at which the condition spreads is a process researchers have described as “bloom”, a period of intense growth, in which the ends of frond-like growths secrete a pink fluid, which may or may not froth up when it comes into contact with air. The fluid is highly infectious and will quickly establish new growths. We have heard unconfirmed reports that pirates may have handed it out to their prisoners of rival gangs as soap.

  All these individuals have become ill.

  Not only is their life span much reduced, but they are less human, as they seem to lose the ability to react in a predictable way. They’re aggressive. They regress to living like animals, with their aim only to conquer, win and propagate themselves, at all costs.

  Sometimes, they’re people with growths all over their skin, but more often, the damage is internal: people living with growths that have fused with their organs, including their brain. Many have died, including about a third of the people who formerly worked at Project Charon. The rest are suspect, or infected, including myself. The infection is slow-acting, so the pirates will kill me before the infection does.

  Both the pirates and the Federacy Force are after me.

  For the Force, it’s very handy to declare the pirates enemies without letting anyone know why they came to be this way, and without telling humanity what to do about it. They think they can contain the problem by annihilating the pirates. They don’t want to face disciplinary action from their own high command and face a scandal of epic proportions if it comes out that this crisis is of their own making. They want to avoid the questions that need to be asked: why were people allowed to pass untested material to third parties? How did it come into the hands of the pirates? How much did the upper command know? How much did people in the Assembly know?

  We don’t know that any alien entity is in control of them, but the condition has joined a large number of formerly separate pirate groups into a large army that is aggressive and expansionist.

  They’re not only engaged in direct warfare, but they will try to win your sympathy, using people who are visually unaffected.

  Whatever you do, don’t lend them any assistance. Whatever good intentions they try to sell to you, don’t believe them. Whatever deals or money they offer, don’t accept them. They will have infiltrated the mainstream authorities. They will offer you opportunities. But if you come back a few months later, they will be ill and barely human. They will kill you. They will torture you. They will destroy us.

  * * *

  A deep chill went through her.

  Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit.

  And this message had lain here for years while the menace spread and had come to this area. Everything made sense.

  Simon Fosnet and the other men who had come that night, attacking her home. Aggression without cause.

  Whatever deals they offer…

  And she was here to get the man money—for medical reasons, he said.

  Then Jake’s offer, to work for him. He “couldn’t say” what the project entailed except she’d be working with that same illegally sold biological material.

  No, surely he couldn’t say anything.

  Jake was in this with Dexter. And Dexter was in it for money or power. Dexter only thought about himself. Dexter might even try to get back at her. Was Dexter affected, too?

  Why was she selling this ship to fund some sort of pirate venture? She should go and rescue the shop in case the pirates had taken possession of that.

  Wait—Did that mean she should keep the ship? She couldn’t even think straight.

  She needed to go back to Rex. She sent him a message. He didn’t reply.

  Well, that wasn’t helpful.

  Tina turned both devices off, put them in her pocket and looked around for something to use as weapon. A hammer from the toolkit would have to do.

  Then she stuck her head out the door of the ship. Rasa sat on her blanket in the access tube.

  “Have you seen anyone come past?” Tina asked her.

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure. Why should I make that up?”

  Tina entered the access tube. The geese came waddling forward, ready to go inside. She quickly slid the door shut.

  “They think it’s their home,” Rasa said.

  “It’s not. I’ve just managed to clean off all the bird poop.”

  Tina glanced down the passage in both directions. It was empty.

  Holding the hammer under her jacket, she went down the hallway. When she came around the corner, a man was coming the other way. He didn’t look suspicious, but she didn’t want to risk it, so she turned right, where she found a hall with a lift that stood open.

  She entered it.

  This lift, of course, took her to the short-term docks, where ships brought supplies for the station. Even if the station offices closed for part of the day, there was still a lot of activity here. Ships were being unloaded, and people were carrying items and wheeling trolleys into storage compartments.

  Not all of the
deliveries came from large commercial ships. Some of the ships were small merchant vessels. The trade in goods went on day and night. One of the ships even came from Cayelle. It was not a large ship, it had only just arrived, and two burly men in grey station overalls were unloading the cargo.

  An older man, presumably the owner of the ship, was telling them to be careful, following them around.

  One of the burly men snapped at him in passing. “Let us do our job. We’ve unloaded many vessels and wouldn’t be doing this job if we didn’t do it properly. We know what we're doing. Leave us alone.”

  As the man was saying this, his colleague wheeled a trolley around him and the owner, who stepped back at that moment, ran backwards into the trolley. One of the boxes fell off.

  The owner gave a strangled cry. "Now look what you’ve done."

  The man who had dropped the box simply put it back on top of the stack and continued walking.

  The owner followed him. “I demand to see your manager. I demand to lodge a complaint."

  "Get out of our way, man. Let us do our job, or there will be more accidents.”

  The owner whirled around and stormed off.

  The two men went back into the cargo hold.

  Tina noticed that something small had fallen out of the box that had dropped to the floor. Neither of the two men had seen it.

  It looked like a bit of fluff, but when she came closer, it turned out to be a spiky cactus seed.

  Tina picked it up.

  What was this doing here?

  They exported cactuses in those boxes? Whatever for?

  Vasily’s words came back to her. Whatever deals they offer…

  The shop owner had offered to give her the shop in return for her cactuses. They were special to her because she had done breeding work with them where she had worked out the complicated structure that allowed different species to breed with each other. She had even written a paper about it—holy crap.

  Of course, the pirates were after the cactuses, and her specimens in particular, or her knowledge about them. They were alien life. Semi-sentient alien life, like she had created by infecting lettuce leaves with the alien matter from the rift.

  What if the rift had opened before and material had rained onto Cayelle? The unusual cactuses only occupied a small area of the planet. The plant life in most of the inhabited areas was very different.

  The ship had to have come from Gandama.

  Hang on—what if they stole her cactuses?

  Tina checked the flights from Cayelle and found a couple of ships that fit the merchant’s ship’s description. All stated Peris City as origin.

  One was said to carry agricultural produce, but it was docked on the other side of the central hall. A second ship belonged to a larger commercial company which had its own docking space, but a third was both big enough and in the right area, and belonged to a private person, but she did a double-take when she saw the owner’s name: J. Monterra.

  Yes, it was clear to her now.

  Jake had asked her to come and work for him in a “special project” that he couldn’t reveal, while he owned a ship that smuggled cactuses from Cayelle, probably knew she was interested in them, and—had he sent Simon Fosnet, or was this a separate incident? On the other hand, how many people could be interested in cactuses?

  Not only that, but she realised why Jake wanted her: because she had spent a long time working with the semi-sentient creatures that lived on some worlds. But what was the secret? To interbreed cactuses with other organisms? Animals? People?

  Tina stuck the seed in her pocket.

  She walked through the old part of the port and then the newer part with the big hall, where a giant screen displayed all the main docks and ships that were arriving or departing. One of the latter was the SS Stavanger. That meant Finn’s shore leave would have been cancelled.

  She went into their hotel and expected Rex to be watching some stupid thing, but the room was empty.

  Well, shit.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Calm down, calm down.

  Likely he’d just gone for a walk. There were plenty of people in the commercial sector and it wasn’t as if anyone would do something to him in a busy area.

  —Except that pawnshop with the gun. They might sell him illegal stuff he didn’t even have money to pay for.

  —Except those people who had been following her. They would know him and might try to kidnap him to get to her.

  —Except Jake Monterra and his secret project. Or people from the Federacy wanting something from her.

  Calm down, calm down.

  She sent him another message. Likely, he had just missed the first one.

  She waited. She stared at the screen, hoping for a reply that didn’t come.

  She felt faint with worry. She had to go and look for him.

  In the hallway outside the room, the questions ran through her mind. What had happened to him? Why hadn’t she insisted that he tell her if he went out? Maybe he had been in trouble and now it was too late.

  In her mind, she saw Rex lying in a dingy corridor, a worm without his harness, dying a certain death if she wasn’t there to help him.

  Somehow she made her way down the stairs and through the reception area.

  It was busy in the commercial thoroughfare, and the hand of panic that clamped around her heart made her alternately hot and cold.

  There were too many people. She couldn’t see anything. She imagined figures lurking in every doorway, behind every dark window, inside every shop. People watched her, gazes following her down the passage. How many of those were spies and how many were just casual observers?

  Where was Rex? Where could she ask about him? Which office could she go to and trust?

  She searched the moving crowd, the shoppers, the shop assistants, the delivery people.

  Rex was nowhere to be seen.

  Where could he be and what should she do?

  And then she saw him. He was standing with Finn in front of a well-lit shop, deep in discussion.

  Well… what was all that about? They didn't look unhappy.

  Tina strode to them, making an effort to keep her emotions in check and not to appear agitated.

  “There you are," she said.

  Rex turned around and looked at her, and she knew she had failed.

  "What's wrong with you?" he said.

  "Didn't you look at your messages?"

  “My…”

  He reached for his belt, pulled off the communication device he carried there, and looked at the screen. His face cleared up.

  "Oh. I didn't hear it."

  "Next time pay more attention. I've just spent half an hour worrying about you."

  His face fell. "I'm sorry. I just didn't hear it."

  "I thought you were going to stay in our room."

  "It was boring, and I decided to go for a walk. You said I could."

  That was right; she had. And now she was annoyed with herself for letting her emotions get away with her. Yes, it seemed a lot of people were curious about her, but it was ridiculous to think anyone would try to kidnap Rex to get to her. Especially in a space station, where every step was recorded and the chance of getting caught for committed crimes was very high.

  She breathed out tension. “So what have you been doing?”

  "I was just looking around here, and then I met Finn.”

  They both turned to the shop. Finn had moved away from the mother-and-son moment and was standing closer to the window.

  A couple of shops had been joined together, and glass installed all down the front. Inside the open and well-lit space people were using exercise equipment, but there was also equipment for sale.

  Part of the window advertising space was taken up by various items of body enhancements for sale. An eyepiece proclaimed that the wearer could see close up and in the distance and in different wavelengths and allowed the projection of data figures in the wearer’s vision. Leg extensions let you run fa
ster; others attached weights for places where the gravity was low, and still others had magnetic soles for walking on walls in zero gravity.

  Against the back of this display area stood a magnificent exoskeleton. It was taller than the one Rex wore now, painted in black and red. The arms were sleek, made out of metal with shining joints. The legs had powerful compressed air pistons that would bounce with every step. Tina recognised them because she had read about these harnesses. The helmet was optional, a cheerful sign said. It displayed a price tag of a cool 5000 credits, and, the cheerful sign continued, it could be adapted to measure overnight at no extra charge.

  Indeed.

  Rex looked at it in complete silence. Only his eyes moved, from the broad shoulders to the feet that looked just like boots and back again.

  It was a beautiful thing.

  Yes, she wished she could afford something like that for him. If he wore a harness like that, people on Cayelle would come to him to do their tasks. They would look up to him, they would want him to help them. He would have no trouble finding work, paying work, too. His peers would look at him in amazement, rather than tease him.

  But at night he would still need his old mother to change his pants and empty the containers. And his current harness was easy to maintain. She could do it, and if a part broke, it was easy to find a replacement. If this expensive, exquisite exoskeleton broke, she bet that the whole thing would need to be shipped to somewhere far away, from where it would take ages to return. It was just not practical.

  She felt almost guilty pulling him away from the shop with the bad news and choices about the future she had to share with him, and she hadn’t yet worked out how she would tell it.

  “We need to find some dinner.”

  "It's so beautiful," he said.

  "Yes. If you do all your schoolwork, maybe I will think about it."

  She didn't know where that came from. The harness she planned to buy for him was much simpler than this one, and she would have to find a hell of a lot of money to be able to afford this thing, let alone pay for its maintenance, but she just couldn't stand the disappointed look on his face.