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

the station was under lockdown, it was surprisingly busy, with people returning from their jobs as if nothing was going on.

It was amazing how quickly people adapted to new situations and how quickly a stifling situation became the new normal.

By the time she got to the entrance of the docks area, most crowds had dissipated.

A couple of men hung around at the checkpoint, but they didn’t appear to be very interested in her. She told them there was a problem with the recycling and that she needed to fix it straight away.

Jens had managed to raise a real technical assistance request, which checked out, and her second ID, with matching company badge, did the trick.

While she waited to go through, a man showed up, wanting to know when a certain passenger ship would arrive. His wife was on it, and he’d been separated from her for more than a year. He got angry when told that no ships were arriving at the docks right now. He showed them the timetable, and started arguing that they couldn’t just stop all traffic to the station.

He was very agitated and the discussion, taking place next to Tina, was confronting and personal. A number of extra guards arrived. Tina wondered how long it would be before an altercation broke out.

But her permission came through and she cleared the checkpoint.

Tina was sweating under her jacket. The tool belt felt heavy around her waist.

The dock area looked much tidier, now that it wasn’t crowded with hundreds of people waiting for tickets off the station, for jobs in the docks or some other thing. Gone were the crowds, the people hanging around in the passages, the begging and heckling.

This area was all business. Cargo was being delivered, people were having business meetings in a row of offices and meeting rooms. It looked like they’d simply cleared out the common people, leaving only those who had a reason to be in the docks.

Tina took a slight detour through the passages past the SF Manila. There was no one at the ship. The door to the entrance tube was closed. The closed-circuit screens displayed a couple of empty corridors and the deserted bridge. The ship data screen said eighty-five percent readiness.

It was really strange, because when a ship prepared for departure, all kinds of tasks needed to be performed by the crew. There would be junior pilots on the bridge putting the ship through tests. There would be people walking around checking all the ship’s power modules. As far as she could see, no one was performing those tasks. It was very strange. Just what did the pirates plan to do with the ship, because they obviously wanted to use it soon?

Someone entered the passage behind her, so Tina kept going in the direction of the agricultural sector.

The passage to this part of the station went through a fairly narrow corridor with a security door at the end. The guards letting her into the docks had given her a temporary access card, and it opened the door as they said it would.

It was odd how some of the station’s operations were in a state of chaos, but others were well-organised. It worried Tina that she had no idea if the well-organised parts were the original station systems, or if they were pirate-installed systems.

She would really like to think that the pirates were poorly organised, but a number of facts pointed to at least some of the pirate systems being better than the original station’s operations.

The security door led into the agricultural sector. The air was humid here, and laced with the familiar earthy scent that accompanied living plants. The main growing areas comprised several levels of racks containing a meshlike tube network that held the crops. Banks of lights hung on the bottom of each shelf to illuminate the plants that grew underneath. Here and there, clouds of humidity issued from sprinklers that came on and switched off by themselves.

Tina walked along the central aisle, looking up at all the greenery surrounding her. The plants were mostly fruit and salad vegetables, which meant there was likely a bigger room somewhere else.

The farms were usually restricted areas in most stations, but most stations also had greenhouses. Yet she remembered very clearly coming to Peris City for the first time, and being amazed at the size and abundance of plants—even if Peris City was a rather dry place. She remembered thinking that her life had been so much poorer without plants, and this was why she’d started growing cactuses. Because more than anything, plants made her feel alive.

The nursery was at the very end of the farm hall. She walked past labs filled with tubes with little plants that would later be planted in larger installations. It was all very familiar. Every station where she had lived had this kind of setup. They even had it in her hometown in Tirkala because the desert didn’t provide enough food. They kept animals, which were a local species, but the vegetation in the dry landscape was not very nutritious.

The bright lights and green haze over the labs was very familiar to Tina. This was the environment in which she had lived and worked for so long.

At the end of the nursery, she came to the main farm. The size of it took her breath away. The space was so big that it was easy to see the curvature of the station’s floor. Layers and layers of growing shelves radiated soft green light. Little robots moved in between the crops, watering them and spraying them with nutrients, and harvesting. A little cart trundled past, full of bright red tomatoes.

A number of people worked on the growing shelves and in the processing plant.

Aurora Station was massive, and this farm was a huge operation, bigger than Tina had ever seen. She made a few recordings, although this was not an area of immediate interest.

The workers she passed did not pay her any attention. In