Project Charon 2 by Patty Jansen (best interesting books to read TXT) 📕

“Jens?”

“Yes. Can you get in contact with him?”

“I could…”

“But?”

“It’s kind of strange. You were never interested in any of my friends before.”

“We were never here to meet them.”

“All right.”

He shrugged and a kind of uneasy silence passed. Tina wanted to ask “Well, why don’t you contact him?” but she remembered a particularly embarrassing occasion when her father had insisted on coming with her to meet some boys from her school, because “it’s important to see the people you hang out with.” It was because she was fourteen, and because her friend was a boy, like most of her friends. They talked to each other about getting parts to build things, and then building those things. Nothing was going on between her and those boys, and having her father there was super awkward, because of the way they spoke to each other, which included a lot of swearing.

So she told Rex, “I might go for a walk while you do this, to see if I can find out anything useful. If you don’t mind staying here, that is.”

Rex said he didn’t.

So Tina left him in the queue. She wasn’t going to be the embarrassing parent.

From the first floor gallery, she could see over the railing onto the ground floor of the atrium. Underneath the first floor gallery on the opposite side were some shops. Maybe she’d be able to buy some supplies there.

But the shops were low on stock, and what they had was hideously expensive, even more so if you couldn’t show proof of residency. And at the shops that sold major survival items, like food, the queues were out the door.

There were some decent second-hand clothing shops, where Tina bought a few basic things for Rasa: two pairs of plain ship overalls, some shirts and a stack of socks.

Standing in a shop looking at overpriced packets of dried ship biscuits, Tina overheard two women complain. Most people on Aurora spoke a Transigian dialect of Sinolese that Tina found hard to understand, but these two had to be from either Olympus or her home world of Tirkala.

“I managed to get a whole crate of milk powder rations,” one of the women was saying.

“A whole crate? Where did you get that?”

“Oh, my brother has connections.”

“Must be really good connections. Wonder how much you paid?”

“It’s not about that. I went to exchange some packets for different items, but they wouldn’t let me into the market hall without registering as a merchant.”

The other woman snorted. “And here was I, thinking that these so-called pirates didn’t want to meddle with our business. Isn’t that what the creep said? What his name again?”

“Artan. Piece of filth.”

“You said it. No, they didn’t want to have rules. But they were lying. They didn’t want our rules. Nothing wrong with their rules.”

The women’s discussion encapsulated, in a nutshell, the feeling that Tina had formed so far about pirate-occupied space. It was unregulated chaos into which someone had attempted to insert some belated rules to make sure the station didn’t destroy itself.

It was also the first time she’d heard any of the pirates named. Artan. She wondered what was known about him.

She walked through the corridors of the commercial section, making sure to record as she went so she could play it back to Finn, who might be persuaded to leave the ship. If this went on too long, he would probably need to leave the ship anyway, because they would be allocated to an area where residence on the ships was restricted.

The commercial section of Aurora Station was much busier than that at Kelso.

But during her walk, she spotted no people who were obvious pirates. In fact, there were no figures of authority at all, no one to lead the crowds into orderly paths. No one to tell anyone what was going on.

A news screen at the ground floor in the atrium displayed looping video clips of a promotional type. A space fleet, a mass of cheering people. The sound from the clip was drowned out by the ambient noise in the hall.

It could be news. It could be propaganda. It could be advertising for some kind of entertainment, for all she knew.

A lot of beggars sat on the corners. As soon as you stopped, someone came up to you asking you for something, not usually money, because they had plenty of that, but food or a lift off the station. Most of these scruffy people looked like they had been there for a long time.

The shops were very busy, too, and, as far as she could tell, none of them carried ship supplies. You could buy fresh fruit and vegetables, but those were from the farms on the station. She needed vacuum-packed food that would keep for a number of months. Those packages were only sold at the Ship Supply office.

So she returned to Rex, finding that he had moved only a little bit up the queue.

“I heard from Jens,” he said. “He’s still here and happy to see us.”

“You know what? We’ll take the number. We can always come back later and resume waiting.” She wasn’t keen to leave anyone here in this soulless queue.

It was really going to take two weeks, wasn’t it? Two weeks during which they always had to have one person inside this damn queue. And then to hope that by the time they got to the front, she had all the documentation and they would accept her credit.

There had to be a different way.

Chapter Nine

But Rex didn’t want to leave his position.

Tina told him to come back with her, but he said, “No mum, it’s exactly like at Gandama. They want you to line up, and if you haven’t waited then they won’t give you whatever it is that you want. They’ll penalise you for not doing as they say, like when we tried to get them to build a water tank.”

Yes, Tina remembered that well. It had been hard enough to get all the people at