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

with the lifts where she had seen Evelle. A lot of warty pirates hung around, keeping the station workers away from the lifts. Had they captured even more ships? Were they bringing in other prisoners?

The lift door opened, but the lift was empty. Two of the warty pirates went in.

Other pirates moved barriers forward once the last of the civilians had come out of the docking areas.

Tina, Rex, Thor and Jens walked through the station, not speaking much other than some chat about shops and other unimportant things, like life at Cayelle.

They arrived at Thor and Jens’ apartment.

“Why don't you show the guests where they can sleep,” Thor said, walking into the living room.

Jens showed Tina and Rex a room that was fully fitted out to have visitors, with two beds, a small cupboard and two chairs. It was small, but comfortable enough.

“Do you often have visitors?” Tina said.

“People come to visit every now and then, when they want their equipment to be fixed. Not too much any more.”

“Do people travel from elsewhere to have their equipment fixed?”

“Miners,” Jens said. “It’s specialised equipment.”

Tina set her bag on the chair and took off her boots. At Gandama she walked barefoot a lot of the time. She didn’t like wearing shoes indoors.

While they had been in the bedroom, Thor had started to prepare dinner.

It was amazing to watch him, because he knew where everything stood in the kitchen. Watching him, you would never be able to tell he was blind.

He said without looking over his shoulder, “Sit down, I’ll make you some tea.”

“I’ll help, if you tell me what I can do,” Tina said.

“That’s not necessary. It’s a simple thing, and there’s not much space in here.”

So Tina sat down at the table, feeling awkward. She didn’t feel like making chitchat and was bad at it anyway.

“If I want to look for my daughter, where should I start?”

“We’ll need proper maps.”

“Rex has already discovered some maps.”

“We’ll have a look. We’ve probably seen those maps before, but they’re all a little bit different, and each one teaches us something we didn’t yet know.”

“You’ve made a study of this before? You say ‘us’ and ‘we’. Does that mean there are more of you?”

“You’ll see.” He didn’t elaborate further.

With his quiet manner, he reminded her somewhat of Dexter, who always responded to her irritation about him not telling her things with “You didn’t ask,” or “If they don’t talk about it, they don’t need to know.”

Even Finn was like that. Heavens, why did she always manage to seek out the men who had to be requested expressly, in triplicate and in writing if possible, to talk about things that normal people would talk about freely?

Dinner was done, and they started eating, while Rex and Jens filled the awkward space by talking about Gandama. Jens seemed impressed that Rex was able to run the shop by himself, and was even more impressed when Rex showed him pictures of his old harness.

“You used to wear that?”

“It was the best we could get at the time,” Tina said. “It’s very hard to get things in Gandama. Not many people live there, and transport is very expensive.”

Thor snorted. “Which is why I never went to a planet. There is less of everything there, and it costs twice as much.”

“Except fresh air and plants and animals.”

“I’ve seen enough of that stuff with those birds of yours,” Thor said.

Tina couldn’t imagine how someone couldn’t want to see blue sky and waving fields of grain. All of a sudden she was back in her youth in Tirkala where she would sit on the veranda looking over the fields. She and her friends would catch lizards under the planks of the veranda. Even back then, she was always growing and keeping things.

Her family had been surprised when she signed up for the Force, but joining the military was not the reason. She joined because the military paid for her studies, and they needed biologists.

“So how did you even start the shop?” Jens wanted to know. “Is it hard?”

He seemed keen to go to a planet. Maybe that was his attraction to Rex: the very thing that Rex wanted to escape from.

“I saw an opportunity. There were a lot of empty buildings, and people were talking about putting a lot of houses in the area, and I figured that people would need surveillance equipment, because that’s what they usually do in a new development, where some other people don’t take the law very seriously.”

“But how did you learn about all these things?”

And then Tina told them how she had to learn all of it herself, mostly from old manuals that she pilfered from second-hand stores and obscure databases, and that the shop did very well, because no one in Gandama had sold anything like that before.

Then the discussion turned to the cactuses.

“Seriously, they move? Are these animals or plants?” Thor wanted to know.

“I still think they’re plants. They’re not very smart, and they react to light and darkness.”

“That sounds very much like something you’ve seen, Jens.”

It sounded like a prompt for Jens to start talking, but Jens was looking at his hands. He let a very long pause go by.

Then he said, “I was really stupid.”

“Come on son, tell them the story.”

Jens looked down at his knees. Eventually, he started talking.

“I was with some of my mates, and we were just having fun. Nothing unusual, nothing that any kid wouldn’t do. It was just after the occupation by the pirates, and we were being let back into the station after having been shut up in our apartments for quite a long time. We were bored and looking for something to do. We had this kid in our group who always wanted to explore. He would climb into things and see where they led. We were always joking how one day he would open the door to an airlock and would be sucked into space.”

Then he sat in thought for a bit.

“You don’t have to