Project Charon 2 by Patty Jansen (brene brown rising strong .TXT) 📗

board. She was doing her bit for humanity, right?

Then the crowd thinned out, and she caught up with Rex.

“Mum, did you see that ancient scanner they were using?” Rex said in a low voice.

“Shhh.”

“And then that gate. I bet I could rip that out of the wall if I wanted.” He flexed his metal hands. Rex had been doing a lot of exercises with his new harness during the journey from Kelso. He had become quite handy with it.

“Shhh,” Tina said again. “I have no idea who’s listening, but someone is bound to keep an eye on us. I didn’t like those guards at all.”

Chapter Eight

At the end of the passage, Tina and Rex came to a spacious atrium area that would have been sleek and modern if it hadn’t been crammed with people and noise.

The air was so hazy that the far end of the space—large enough to show the curvature of the floor—disappeared into a bluish mist.

They really had a problem with dust and clean air here. This couldn’t be sustainable or healthy for the station. Everywhere Tina looked, crowds and lines of people waited to enter offices.

A long line of people accompanied by travel bags stretched across the hall. Some people had sat down, and others were even asleep with her heads on their luggage. Men looked unshaven, women were dishevelled, children whined.

How many days had they been waiting here?

“Where do all these people come from?” Tina asked, not that she expected Rex to know the answer.

“The news says there has been conflict at the outstations,” Rex said. His new harness gave him access to all the online information at the touch of a finger. He’d been much delighted with the screen that folded out from his arm that provided him with information, including the news, but also diagnostics on electronics he was working on.

“Which are these outstations?” Tina asked.

He read off the screen. “A number of mining stations that supply Aurora Station. Apparently some of them have become unstable, and the inhabitants have fled while the Pirates and the Federacy Force are fighting over who owns them.”

And that would mean a great number of people had streamed into the station, and now the station might be over capacity, which explained the humid foul tang of the air.

Then he added, “Oh, and it says here the habitat of Beta Station is about to collapse.”

“Just as well we didn’t go there, then.”

Tina and Rex found the Ship Supply office on the second floor gallery of the large hall. The queue stretched out the door.

Tina joined it bravely, and soon a number of people filed behind her. But the same people were still at the front. If they were going to wait here, they would still be waiting tomorrow morning.

There was a ticketing system in place, but no one appeared to be using it. Tina asked about it.

“Sure, you can get a number and come back later to see how far it’s gone down the line,” a woman who was also waiting said. “But everyone knows your turn comes up much more quickly when you stay here.”

“And how long would that be?”

“A few days.”

A few days sounded better than two weeks. Maybe they could manage a few days. If waiting here could cut the time from two weeks to a few days, then it might be wise to stay.

A good number of children waited in the line, some sitting patiently on their bags. A few others were talking to each other.

A teenage boy came in, and spoke to a younger boy who was waiting. The boy hopped off the suitcase and scampered out the door while the older one took the position.

That was how other people managed it: they took turns.

They could manage that, too, if they all took turns waiting here.

Tina and Rex waited a bit longer, because Tina wanted to see what would be required of them once their turn came up. She asked some people.

A man had been waiting for two days. He said it would be his turn in another two or three days. He also said supplies were expensive, but he’d heard they were delivered promptly.

A woman said she’d been through the system a few times. Sometimes the supply office made everyone wait and nothing happened for days and all of a sudden they approved and supplied every ship and cleared everyone out of the docks fast. She had even heard that, in extreme cases, no one was charged for the supplies.

That seemed a bit of a wishful thinking folk tale, but someone else chimed in that he had heard that, too. But you never knew when it would happen.

“It throws my entire schedule into disarray, I tell you, to be told to leave when I haven’t finished business yet.” The man was holding commercial papers. He had to be a private courier. “These days I avoid coming here if I can.”

It seemed a great source of frustration that people couldn’t get supplies quickly because they wanted to leave, and she also heard that if you had a passenger ship, the delivery of supplies might be conditioned on the agreement to take as many passengers as your ship would take off the station.

Which was, of course, why they had asked about the ship’s capacity.

If that happened, did they have any choice in passengers?

Tina asked around, but people gave different answers. It seemed to depend on who handled your case.

The people on the other side of the counter were a mixture of men and women, young and old. None of them looked fairer or more bribable than any other. Were you meant to bribe them? If so, they were stuck here.

Maybe bribes could be bought according to the number of passengers you took off the station. If so, they were still stuck. The ship was licensed to take eight, but it had been crowded enough with four.

She said to Rex, “I think I’d like to talk to a local. You said something about