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

for a cure against the infection.

His eyes widened. “Really? And he says his family isn’t in it for the money?”

“When you’re as rich as they are, two million credits is probably not enough to pay your monthly grocery bill.”

“But I thought you said he didn’t like his family and he wasn’t working for them any more.”

“Liking and not working for are two entirely different things. I don’t think he’s working for them directly. Apparently his family doesn’t know that he’s bombed out of the Force. I don’t like his keeping secret that there was a reward for the cure and that he was married to the station director, but I think he was embarrassed about it, rather than that he deliberately hid it from us.”

“Do you think all of this could have anything to do with that paper you sent away for publication?”

“That’s what I’ve been wondering. I think it’s drawn attention to me. To us. I’m sorry.”

A group of workers in ship overalls came the other way. It must be the end of a mining shift. Tina and Rex weaved their way between them.

“So what arrangements did you make with your friend?” Tina asked when they got back together.

“He wants to see us now,” Rex said.

“Did he tell you where he lives?”

“He said he’d meet us in the hall.”

From the first gallery level in the atrium, they looked out over the heads of the people on the ground floor. There were hundreds and hundreds of people here.

“Do you know what he looks like?”

“I don’t, but there he is,” Rex said.

He was looking at the screen on his arm.

It displayed a red dot over a young man who was weaving through the crowd and coming in their direction.

As Tina and Rex stood watching him, he stopped and looked up. It turned out he was just underneath the balcony.

He was much younger than Tina expected. He was thin and lanky, pale-skinned with elfin-like blond hair.

“How old is this kid?” Tina asked.

“Hey, I’m sixteen. You said I was an adult. He’s a year older. You can’t call him a kid.”

He looked like a kid. He even carried one of those ubiquitous kid-weapons, a catapult, in his pocket. “And he knows how to fix ships?” Tina’s hope of getting a cheap fix job evaporated before her eyes.

“He doesn’t, although he could probably do a decent job, but it’s his dad who does the work.”

All right. His dad sounded a bit better.

They took the stairs down, meeting Jens on the ground level. The kid wore baggy, much-used clothes that were at least one size too big for him. All of his clothing was dark, either black or some variation of black. His most notable feature was his startling light-blue eyes.

“Hi,” Rex said.

The boy said, “Hi.”

And then they stood in a kind of awkward silence.

“You’re Jens?” Tina asked.

“I am.”

And then there was another awkward silence

These boys never expected to see each other. They certainly hadn’t expected to see one another in her presence. Mothers did really spoil a lot of teenage fun, simply by being present.

Jens was taking in Rex and his armour. He smiled. “That’s really awesome.”

“Thanks,” Rex said. “But you have to credit my mother, because she got it for me at Kelso.”

The eerie light blue eyes took her in. “That’s so awesome. What can you do with it?”

“I’m still discovering.”

And that was true. Every day, Rex discovered new things he could do with his harness.

Jens again looked at Tina. “Rex tells me that you have a shop where you sell all this cool security equipment?”

“I do.”

That was the first time her shop had been mentioned in this way.

“He tells me that you managed to get a box of Hirsh-94 3D sensors.”

“I did, but we sold some of them.”

“I can imagine. They’re so awesome. You can’t imagine what you can do with them.”

Tina felt a pang of regret. Life was so simple at Gandama, and when—or if—she ever came back, the shop would no longer be there.

The sensors, though, she hadn’t been able to bring herself to leave in dusty Gandama, and they were back at the ship. Minus the two she’d sold.

“We need an inverter fixed,” Tina said. “We have a large-systems engineer on board, but no one who’s an expert in electronics.”

“My dad’s amazing. He’s the one who does the fixing. Come, I’ll take you to him.”

They started walking through the corridors. Tina made sure she had her tracker turned on, because she wanted to know where they were.

Rex and Jens had gotten over their awkwardness and were now asking each other about others in their group. At first they spoke in soft voices, and then they laughed and spoke more freely.

Rex asked about all the people Jens had met of their community, and Jens said some of them lived on the station, but he didn’t know who they were, and some were friends he saw quite regularly. It depended how much he trusted the people whether he wanted to meet them, because you had to be careful.

Compared to him, Rex had grown up in a very isolated environment. His contact with his technology groups was the only thing that kept him tied with other young people. Rex possibly trusted too many people.

And she had been trying to limit the amount of time he spent chatting to them. That’s what parents did: they drew you away from friends and fun things to make you do dumb tasks like clean up your room, and then they dared accuse you of not being social enough.

Yeah, things you’d never thought you’d say to your kids.

They arrived at a residential area. Sometimes the apartment doors stood open, and sounds of talking, smells of cooking, and music drifted out. Little children ran around playing games in small courtyards.

This was a type of station area that Tina had rarely seen.

Jens turned to one of the doors. He unlocked it by pressing the palm of his hand against the lock—an unusually tight security arrangement that was