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

brother and I both had the same training, but I chose to go for the big money and started working for private enterprises. That’s where I first found out about the effort by pirates to buy up samples and knowledge about this strange rift material. I warned my brother because I knew he was working on it at the time, and we grew concerned about the things we were seeing, that people were using it to deliberately infect living organisms, like plants.”

“I saw that when I worked at the project. There might have been some internal papers about it.”

“When was this?”

“It must have been close on twenty years ago. I was working for the project at the time. Why didn’t your brother contact me then? It would have been much easier because we were working in the same place.”

“You were considered too much of a risk. Dexter was known to be sympathetic to commercial interests. He was frustrated that the full potential of the rift material was not being used. He said that if the Federacy wasn’t going to do anything with it, people would come in and steal it and do illegal things.”

“How ironic.”

“Anyway, you were not in our sights. You were also having lots of trouble with your daughter at the time, so we didn’t think that you would have any interest in being in the scientific ethics society.”

Tina had heard of this society, and she remembered a number of people going to talks and meetings after work. She’d gone to a couple of talks. And yes, she had wondered why she’d never been invited to become a member, but Evelle was also giving her grief back then, and if she’d been invited, she would have declined anyway. “Hang on, are you saying that this society is the resistance? The group I knew about just organised talks. I didn’t have time to attend many of them, because of all the things I was going through at the time, but I did go to some.”

“That’s what we used to call ourselves. We did talk about a whole lot of things other than ethics, but it was a way to disguise our concerns from those who might care. People expect scientists to debate things, so no one thought anything of it. We scoped out possible members of a more secret group at the meetings, judging by the opinions they displayed.”

“Is that what you’re doing now? Banding together with scientists to beat the pirates?”

“I don’t know that we’re powerful enough to defeat the pirates. We have grown much bigger and include a lot more people. We’ve started giving so-called education lessons to tell people what is happening. We don’t talk about the pirates or about station management or anything political, so we can fly under the radar.”

“How many people are we talking about?”

“On the station, probably about two thousand.”

“Two thousand, out of how many? The station is said to have a population of a million.”

“That was before the occupation. At the moment, it’s much less. And I’m only talking about two thousand people who are members of our organisation and who regularly come to gatherings. I’m not talking about their sympathisers, or their families. If we take all those people into consideration, the numbers are going to be much greater. Especially if we become more active.”

“So, how many people are there on the station at the moment?”

“Bearing in mind that we aren’t privileged to look into the station operation databases, we guess probably about three hundred thousand.”

“That’s just the public side of the station?”

“Yes. A great number of people disappeared during and shortly after the occupation. We simply don’t know where they went. Others left, but this is a small proportion, because many people were long-term residents who didn’t have the means to leave.”

“And you’ve found no indication of what happened to the people who disappeared?”

“Other than that we suspect there are still a lot of people in the restricted side of the station, no. We don’t know if they’re the missing people. We don’t know if they’re different people. The heat might not be generated by people at all. We know that a lot of ships arrive and depart when they close the docks to the public. The problem is motivating the people to do something. Our evidence isn’t strong enough. People are scared. People are complacent. They get on with their lives.”

“People are stupid and careless,” Thor said. His voice was dark. “They pretend that the occupation is the new normal and carry on with their pitiful daily lives.”

“You’re saying that people have been happy with the occupation?”

At the same time Thor was about to say something angry, Arkady continued, “I wouldn’t say happy.”

Thor snorted. “They are happy, though, because they occasionally get free things, and the pirates leave them alone for the most part. There is less control and people often like that, even if it also leads to bad things.”

Arkady said, “You have to understand this. Prior to the occupation, the station management went through a long period of political turmoil that made people switch off, and occasionally made them angry about the lack of morals of their leaders. Mostly the people stopped caring; they only wanted the politics and the scandals and the corruption to go away. And strangely enough, when the pirates came in and made station management irrelevant, most people were happy to see the worst offenders go, and didn’t care terribly much about what happened to them. They were glad that the political circus stopped and they could go on with their daily lives without having to put up with the antics of corrupt politicians.”

“That sounds somewhat familiar,” Tina said.

“Have you heard about it?”

“No, but it is the story of the downfall of so many human civilisations. Somebody stopped caring and so the bad guys got in, and humanity spent the next couple of decades figuring out how anyone ever allowed it to happen.”

He nodded.

“Anyway, we’re hoping that if we can show them