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

that, she might have realised that trouble was brewing long before now. Then again, what could she have done about it? She tried, and Dexter still sold material to the pirates.

Thor announced it was time for them to go home. Jens wanted to stay, but his father said that it was best not to draw attention to themselves until they brought back the inverter.

They went to the door to the access tube, but before they left the cabin, Finn asked Thor, “Did you ever serve in the Force?”

Thor laughed. “Did I serve? I was their star missile technician.”

A silence passed in which someone should have asked “But what happened?” but didn’t. Yet everyone looked at his dark glasses, which, in turn, he couldn’t see.

He continued, “That was until some dickhead switched on the high-intensity laser while I was working on it. Burned my eyes. I was thirty three. They retired me after that, but I didn’t want their pity, so I struck out on my own. Learned to do the work without my eyes.”

He was a brave fellow. Tina liked him.

When Thor and Jens had gone, Tina did some research on Jackson Hirsh. Pictures from his time in the Federacy Assembly showed him as a friendly-faced man with a thoughtful expression. He was supposed to look like a toad now?

His employment record showed that he’d been a public servant for his entire career. He’d never been in the Force, never been to Project Charon or even Pandana. He wasn’t listed in any need-to-know lists for Federacy Force research, or indeed any kind of advice or emergency council.

But her very last check delivered a surprise: he’d been at the meeting where Dexter had passed his materials to the pirates.

Well, that was interesting, although he looked to have been there as admin staff, and there was no record of meetings that involved him, and indeed his name was never mentioned in any of the meeting’s reports.

Very interesting.

Tina got up to make some tea.

The one stray goose was waddling down the hallway, looking for a way back into the cabin where it could hear its companions. Tina went to open the door. It waddled through and flew on top of the cage.

Tina shook some grain into the bird feeder and opened the door when the four geese in the cage were crowding around the tray. The fifth goose joined them.

She noticed some spots on its back.

Strange. Tina was sure all geese were completely white. It must have brushed against something dark, because there were some golden spots on its back. Now she was worried because it looked like oil, and she hoped to hell nothing up there in the sloping roof cavity of the cabin was leaking, because a lot of the vital driving and stabilising mechanism of the habitat’s rotation system went through there.

“Have you noticed any drops of oil on the floor in the last few days?” she asked Finn when she came back into the cabin.

“No, why?” Finn asked.

“Just keep a lookout for any.” Damn, she hoped that mechanism wasn’t going to blow up, too. That would make their trip to wherever extremely unpleasant.

Rex had ensconced himself inside the navigation cubicle with the computers.

“I’m going to make some tea,” she announced.

He nodded, not looking up from the screen.

“What are you doing?” Tina asked him.

“Checking out some of the stuff Jens showed us.”

“Getting into satellite recordings?”

“I don’t know. I’ll see what I can find.”

Tina went to the kitchen at the back of the cabin.

“Security is pretty lax,” he commented a bit later. “It’s easy to get into a lot of stuff.”

“Don’t get us into any more trouble than we already are,” Tina warned.

“They don’t even use double-checking protocols.”

“I find that hard to believe.” That was pretty standard for security procedures even on the backward world of Gandama.

“I’m not kidding. Come and have a look at this,” he said.

She went into the cubicle, where he had flipped out the table so that he could use it as a stand for his projector.

It displayed a long list of what looked like a supply order. Tina was familiar with those, because you needed to fill those out if you wanted to buy something in the Force. That sort of information was not normally open to the public.

This one contained all manner of chemical components.

“What is this?” she asked.

“I don’t know, but it says ‘confidential’ at the top.”

It did, too. Tina wondered why a supply order for chemicals was confidential. They were pretty standard lab supplies. “What would they do with this?”

But no one could answer that question.

Chapter Twelve

Before having a very late dinner, Tina went to the Ship Supply office to check with Rasa. The floor of the room had been turned into a camp, with sleeping mats and even blow-up mattresses spread over the floor. They were all placed in neat rows with room to walk in between. The people’s bags sat on the seats where people waited during the day. People sat or lay on their makeshift beds. Two children in pyjamas made their way out of the room carrying a small bag with what Tina assumed to be toiletries.

Tina found Rasa close to the side of the room, sitting on a mat, talking to a middle-aged woman and a man Tina assumed to be the woman’s husband.

The couple both looked up when Tina approached, and Rasa, with her back to the door, turned around.

“It’s my turn,” Tina said. “Go back to the ship to get some dinner.”

“I’ve already eaten. The people here are really nice. They’re all from the ships and they all know each other and help each other—Hanna, this is my captain, Tina.”

“Hi.” The woman smiled at Tina, a bit awkward.

Rasa got to her feet. “You don’t need to take my spot. This is what the junior crew does. These people are all junior crew or passengers who have agreed to sit here in return for a cheap fare. Captains don’t wait here.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes, sure. You