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

There were at least fifty of these cabinets on this section of the gallery. Each gallery consisted of at least ten of these sections, maybe more, but it got too dark at the far end of the huge chamber for her to see. There were at least six gallery levels on this side of the chamber, and another six on the other. That meant there were about six thousand men being turned into warty toads.

Then she came to a group of people who were barely recognisable as human. Their clothes had been cut away from them, showing that the protuberances grew all over their skin. One of these people had been frozen, with a layer of rime lining the tentacles. Tina wondered why that was. Had the person not survived the experiment? Or were they able to freeze people and revive them later? Or was that the experiment they were doing here?

Arkady had said that the people with the more grotesque modifications were the strongest.

She remembered seeing the monkey-like creature in her backyard, sick at the thought that this might once have been a human.

And these people had made the effort to come to her at Gandama to get their hands on the cactuses or on her and Rex for their experiments. Maybe once these creatures were released from these cubicles, they were slaves to their masters.

She felt sick.

It was really quiet in this room, with only the occasional hiss of air going into the capsules, a very low hum of the equipment, and the usual distant clicks and clangs as the station rotated and moved into and out of sunlight.

She collected images and sent them to Jens, hoping that Thor’s friends and their families would be angry enough to demand answers.

The pirates were doing this to innocent people. Perhaps they had done it to the people who had gone missing at the station.

But there were so many of them. What other stations did the pirates have? How many of these people would they need to populate their army? Could she afford to wait doing something about this until she managed to get to Olympus?

Her gut feeling said probably not.

How long would it take before the change in these men’s bodies was irreversible? How long would they have to lie here in these cabinets under these blue lights—hang on. Hadn’t she observed some strange changes in her cactuses when grown under artificial light aboard the Alethia? Grow lights in a ship habitat often had a higher concentration of UV than sunlight, because it strengthened the structure of the stems so they didn’t go too floppy in lower gravity. That was it: the third DNA strand mutation was activated by exposure to ultraviolet light. Arkady had said that his work pointed in that direction.

So what if… she just turned all these lights off? And then turned off the other machines so that the men weren’t kept asleep?

But where to do that?

Jens would be able to find out.

Tina found another workstation, connected her diagnostic screen and wrote a message explaining what she wanted. Turn off the power to this room. Try to do it in a way that was not immediately obvious. He might be able to just turn off the galleries at the end of the room where she had entered, disabling just the cabinets that contained the Manila crew.

But before she was able to send it, there was a soft sound behind her.

She whirled around.

Two men stood behind her. She had no weapon, because anything that could be used as such was in her tool kit and there was no time to unpack it. It was too late to run.

“What are you doing here?”

The man looked unfamiliar. He was wearing a uniform, but unlike any Tina had ever seen. The material was made from a metallic type of fabric that sat snugly over his body. He looked very shapely, with wide shoulders and muscled arms.

His partner had grey mottled skin, but still looked human.

“I have an order to make some repairs. I think I got lost and I was just asking my boss where I need to go.”

Tina glanced at her comm device. Whatever happened, she needed to send that message to Jens.

“Where is your authorisation?”

“Hang on, I’ll show it to you.”

Tina pressed “send” on the message to Jens. She hoped she’d filled in all the relevant details, like his address. Then she wiped the screen and pulled up the fake maintenance order Jens had made for her. She showed it to the men.

They frowned.

“That’s in the recycling plant next door. You’re in the wrong place.”

“Oh. Sorry. I’m new.”

He gave her a suspicious look. “How did you get in anyway?”

“The door was open, and there was no one to ask if I was in the right place,” Tina said.

“This is a restricted area.”

“I understand, but as I said, the door was open.”

“Hmm. Did you get a pass to get into the ag sector?”

“I did.”

He held out his hand, and Tina handed it to him, much as she didn’t want to give it. He inserted the pass into a reader and showed the screen to his colleague, who nodded, but said nothing.

Tina’s heart was hammering.

“We’ll be keeping this.”

“But I need to get into the right place.”

“You don’t need the pass to get out of a restricted area.”

“I need to fix—”

“Go back to the checkpoint and apply for a new pass.”

“I’ll have to go and talk to my boss.”

“You do that.”

Tina shouldered her toolkit bag and walked past the two men. Her legs trembled when she went down the stairs to the ground floor.

What should she do?

If she went back to the apartment, they would follow her and find out about Thor and Jens. If she went back to the checkpoint, they would refuse a second permit, and they would look into who issued the first one.

She didn’t need the pass to get out of the restricted area. But now she was already in the restricted area…

The two men were still on