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

You never got to enter a Federacy fighter warship. Access was limited only to the crew. Even if you needed to travel on a troop carrier, and Tina had done that plenty of times, there were specific areas that were out of bounds, where sensitive equipment was housed.

It looked like this ship had been thrown completely open for anyone who wanted to come in.

Through the entry port, Tina, Rex, Rasa, Thor and Jens followed the stream through a maze of corridors, where people wandered around taking the crew’s possessions from their bunks. She had no doubt that somewhere the pirates would be trying to get more valuable information out of the ship, but they seemed unashamed about looting it.

She wanted to know which cabin had been Evelle’s, and wanted to protect her daughter’s possessions from these strangers. Evelle might have kept mementoes like photographs. Maybe she’d kept in contact with her father.

All these thoughts made her feel sick.

A bit further down the hallway, the stream of people turned left and down a set of stairs in a central hallway where there were also lifts and screens displaying the status of the ship.

Big war ships functioned very differently from the Alethia. They took a long time to ramp up to be ready for departure. The Alethia’s ion drive was almost instantly ready. The Manila’s reactor needed to be carefully powered down when the ship came to dock, relying on the auxiliary engines for fine manoeuvring, and the reverse process happened when the ship departed. It took a number of days.

The departure readiness of the Manila showed seventy-five percent. That seemed a little on the high side.

The lower floor contained a massive galley kitchen with several workspaces, a serving window along one wall, and a supply storage area at the back.

Because this type of ship didn’t have a rotating habitat, the workspaces were against the sides, facing each other. It was a strange sight, while standing on the floor. It was hard to imagine that kitchen staff would be working at both those ends. All the kitchen implements were held in place in knife blocks and spoon jars with magnets. A couple of dirty plates lay on the floor, evidence that the ship had been ambushed and the pirate attack had come suddenly.

Someone had opened the banks of storage cupboards at the back and had taken out all the crew rations that were stored in closed crates. The lids lay on the floor and people were rummaging through them, picking out the ones they liked.

Rex groaned. “Not more curry, please.”

His eyes were better than Tina’s, and when she bent over the opened crates, she saw that he was right.

“Curry it is, then.”

With all the people scavenging the supplies, the crates emptied quickly. It was like shark feeding.

She and Rex started filling up the baskets on the trolley before everything was gone, while Thor held the trolley steady and Jens disappeared into the door to the storage area.

He came back with an arm full of packets. “This might be better.”

He dumped the parcels in the top basket.

It was. These parcels were much more varied, and many contained single items, not complete meals.

There were even luxuries like bread and real meat, all wrapped up in preserving parcels.

“That must be the officer meals,” Tina said.

It was everyone for themselves. There was no control about who took what for how many.

It was sickening and, at the same time, the reality was that they had to take part.

“Let’s take as much as we can put in the trolley,” she said. “We’re going to need to come back to get more, but this will be a good start. Pack it in as efficiently as you can.”

They proceeded to stuff the trolley full of rations, and then someone found some laundry bags and they filled those up, too.

One bag got so big that Rasa couldn’t carry it any more, so Rex took some of the content out, put it in the second bag and then filled it up so that he could carry two bags while Tina and Rasa each carried one and Thor wheeled the trolley.

So burdened, they returned to the Alethia. They emptied their loot, folded up the bags and returned to the Manila.

They filled up their bags again, and took the contents back to their own ship.

Inside the cabin, Finn had laid out all the previous rations according to their contents.

He said, “I don’t like curry. Why did you get so much curry?”

“Most of what they had was curry. It’s better than nothing,” Tina said.

But even as she said that, she could smell the curry and see the yellow glop with unidentifiable chunks in a bowl.

“We probably have enough to get us to Olympus, but I’d like to go for another trip,” Tina said. “Just in case we strike misfortune, because I don’t want to be stuck and have to visit one of the stations again.” In her mind she thought not so much about detours, but about having an extra passenger on board, and maybe Evelle would bring a friend, too.

They needed to plan for everything.

Then they went back to the Manila, where the stream of people going in and out was even bigger.

Word must have gotten around in the station that there was something to be had, because not all of the people were ship crew.

In most communities, even Gandama, looting was a crime. Nobody seemed to care here.

“Isn’t that what pirates do?” Rex said when she told him about it.

“I wonder what they do when they start looting from each other,” Tina said. “It’s all very well looting from someone you don’t know, from a society that’s not yours, but once people start taking each other’s possessions, that’s when it becomes troublesome.”

“Maybe that’s why everyone is so suspicious.”

They went down the stairs into the landing that led to the galley. The big screen display showed the ship at seventy-seven percent readiness. She swore last time it said seventy-five. So