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

the ship was being prepared for departure? Even while it was being looted. What were the pirates going to do with it?

Chapter Seventeen

They filled up the trolley for the last time. Still more people streamed into the galley. The crates with rations had long been emptied, and people were now scavenging parcels from the sections that couldn’t be removed.

Others were opening whichever cupboards along the sides of the galley walls they could reach, climbing on each other’s shoulders if necessary, and handing down storage boxes and drawers. They collected plates, and cups and cutlery. They argued with each other over which side of the kitchen was theirs.

“Are we all done?” Tina asked. She didn’t like how the atmosphere was turning aggressive in the galley. By now, most of the ship crew was gone, and the people rummaging through the cupboards were pirates. Arguments broke out over certain items. Most of them spoke various dialects that Tina didn’t understand. Men and women in different dress codes worked together. A group in dark red appeared to be a family, a grandfather, a father, a mother and two teenage daughters. All of them pirates, but unarmed, and interested only in pots and pans. The grandfather was guarding a hoard of them, shooing away a young boy in blue clothing who tried to sneak off with one of the pans.

Those groups were the real Freerangers, from the tight-knit, highly independent shipworlds, and they appeared to be different from the other ship crews in that they looked for items to sell.

A mutant pirate with grey skin and a toad-like appearance came to the door and looked in. The grandfather clamped his jaw and glared at the man.

That was an interesting exchange. Artan, Jackson Hirsch, wasn’t born a pirate. Tina didn’t know how he came to be a pirate, but she hadn’t given much thought to the possibility that the “real” Freeranger pirates didn’t like him at all.

The toad-pirate remained at the door, returning the grandfather’s angry stare.

The Freeranger mother in dark red called both her daughters, and the group sidled out the door, leaving behind a number of pots they couldn’t carry.

The boy in blue ran to grab them, but another boy had noticed them, and a fight broke out. The blue mother yelled at the other boy, and his family yelled back. In particular a young man got very angry, and came at the blue mother. He grabbed her by the arm, and for one moment looked like he was going to attack her.

“Oy. Stop that,” Tina called out.

It was a reaction that bubbled up out of her memory, where she used to tell off younger workers at Project Charon to keep them from getting into worse problems and facing disciplinary action if they were caught in a fistfight.

She might be much older now, but her voice had lost none of its authority.

The boy let go of the mother’s arm and went back to his family. The blue family eyed Tina. A man who looked like the father of the family gave a tiny nod.

“Let’s get out of here,” Tina said. She had no intention of getting involved in pirate politics.

Thor wheeled the trolley to the landing, where many people burdened with loot waited for the lifts.

The tone of conversations around them was angry.

Two toad-pirate guards stood on the stairs. The bank of screens played clips of oddly peaceful scenery. The ship’s readiness had climbed to seventy-eight percent.

The lift door opened, and the waiting crowd surged forward. Tina, Rex, Rasa, Jens and Thor were caught up, especially the latter because he held the trolley, he couldn’t see, he wanted nothing to fall off and he could only go where people pushed him.

They managed to fit into the lift.

It complained about being overloaded and two people had to get off before it would move.

If Tina had hoped that the upstairs landing would be less busy, she was wrong. Coming out of the lift, they were met with a cordon of toad-pirates.

Many people streamed down the stairs, some of them pushing, others running and half-climbing over the railing. Most of those people were Freeranger pirates.

Screens around the lifts and stairwell showed different parts of the ship, most of them also crowded, except one: the ship’s bridge was abandoned.

Using the trolley as snowplough, Tina guided Thor into the passage that led back to the entry tube.

They were not the only group trying to get out. They formed a conga line of ship crews inching through what appeared to be a series of arguments between pirates, who were yelling from both sides of the passage, over the heads of those trying to get out of the ship.

But around the corner, they ran into trouble. The passage was blocked. A great mass of people was waiting to get through to the entrance tube of the ship.

Tina looked at Rex. “Can you see what’s going on?”

He looked over the heads of the crowd. “One of those warty pirate guys is out the front,” he said.

“What is he doing?”

“He’s yelling something.”

Yes, Tina could hear a man shouting, but the words were unintelligible.

She tried to stand on her toes to see. Rex couldn’t flip out the step on the side of his harness, because his hands were full with bags of rations.

A few other people shouted, followed by a clang that reverberated through the floor under Tina’s feet.

Thor swore. “You don’t discharge weapons inside a ship or station.”

People screamed.

The crowd surged back. Tina grabbed Rasa’s arm and pulled her behind the trolley as someone tripped over the wheels, and other people tripped over the man who had fallen. Other people clambered over the top.

Thor said, “Come on! Take cover behind the trolley.”

Jens and Rasa crouched in the shelter. Tina helped Thor to keep the trolley in place. People were bumping it and tripping over the wheels and pushing it aside.

They wouldn’t be able to hold their position for long.

The back of the trolley already pushed into Tina’s legs. If