Project Charon 2: Originator

Chapter 2

Chapter Two

When Tina came back into the habitat, the couch was empty.

“Where is Finn?” she asked.

“He said he was going to the gym,” Rex said.

The gym was in the other swinging arm of the habitat section, and accessible only through the zero-gravity centre of the ship. She hadn’t noticed anyone coming past when she was at the controls, but the tube was at the back of the passage, and she had been busy.

“He seems so grumpy,” Rex said.

“Yeah, I’m not sure what’s going on,” Tina said. She stood behind Rex, looking at the little parts that Rex and Rasa had taken out of the airlock panel that lay on the table, labelled and numbered so that they could remember what went where. The collection of little chips wobbled slightly with the constant movement of the habitat’s rotation.

“You really didn’t want to go to Beta,” Rex said.

“I’ve been there. It’s a foul, disgusting place. I doubt pirate occupation has made it any better. It’s not safe for us.”

“It’s OK to say that it’s about me,” Rasa said, without looking up from her work.

They had turned up the light above the table to its maximum strength, which made Rasa’s skin look near-white. The tiny tattoo on her upper arm stood out black.

Rasa had told her that she’d been given the mark “when I was a young girl” but had said very little about the circumstances in which she had received it. Tina had tried to search for the meaning of the small rune-like sign that looked like a satellite dish pointing upwards, but had drawn a blank.

Yet it had to mean something, most likely ownership by a pimp.

“Well,” Tina said. “I wouldn’t want your old life to catch up with you.”

Rasa didn’t reply to that. Exactly what that old life of hers was remained a mystery.

She met Rex’s eyes across the table. The corner of his mouth twitched, while he used his metal hands to pull another chip loose from the circuit board.

Having Rasa along had been good for both her and Rex. Rasa was smarter than Tina would have given the dirty creature she’d first found living inside her long-abandoned ship credit for. She had expected to have to teach her to do the most basic things like clean her teeth and sleep in a bed, let alone things like reading and writing.

But to her surprise, Rasa had basic knowledge of most of those things, even if she was still scared of the noise made by the jets hissing water vapour into the shower.

Under her dirty stolen clothing, she had worn a belt with a satchel that contained a few treasures and an ID card in the name of Rasa Vichenko, with a photo of a young girl.

The name itself didn’t register any warnings, but the number matched up with the accessible part of the database and the birth date was roughly accurate. It showed Rasa as having been born at a place called Malan Intersect Station, which Tina was utterly unfamiliar with but turned out to be a medium-size industrial station in the Centauri Mining belt. Her parents were Dom Vichenko and Lara Petrova. They were both miners.

Rasa claimed that she had a brother in the Force. A Force membership search under Vichenko had brought up twenty-five records. The public side of the database didn’t allow users to view the details and images of the employees.

Rasa said his name was Jack. There was no Jack in the list.

At some point the family must have broken up. If Rasa’s timeline about this was correct, it had happened when she was a little girl, after which she and her mother had drifted from ship to ship, station to station, courtesy of a number of her mother’s dubious boyfriends, before Rasa either ran away or was kicked out of a ship by one of those men. Her story on this varied, but in all versions it happened when she was ten.

Rasa didn’t like talking about how she had survived, and Tina didn’t press her. But it was frustrating sometimes.

Tina started making dinner, while Rex and Rasa finished up and packed all the bits away.

“How did you do?” Tina asked.

“We need to buy a few things to make it work,” Rex said.

Why didn’t that surprise her? “All I want is a simple lock on the gate so that it can’t be opened accidentally.”

“Yes, but that won’t happen without the lock hardware. We have spare controllers, but we need a different lock.”

“We need a lot of things before we can afford that. We’ll just have to make do and remind everyone not to open the gate to the goose cage in zero g, or they’ll get to clean the entire cabin of goose poo and feather fluff.”

Rex and Rasa went off to reinstall the lock in the cargo hold in the other end of the arm that held the living areas. Their laughing and chatting was audible all the way up the ladder.

Tina liked how they got along so well. That friendly relationship had taken the tension off disagreements between her and Finn many times.

Finn now came back, his hair wet from the shower. He went to put the cups and plates on the table without saying a word.

He’d been doing this a lot recently, where he used to be quite chatty. In fact, she had only asked him to come because he seemed lonely and she could use an engineer. She had soon found out about his infamous family, though he said little about them other than that he’d signed up to the Force to escape them, only to be forcefully retired from the Force for disagreeing with a superior on a matter of safety.

She said, “Is there a problem?”

“Other than that I worry about my family’s enemies catching up with me at Aurora?”

“Yes, because you’ve been grumpy for much longer than this.”

“I’m just like that. I’m not a very cheerful person.”

“You weren’t like that at Kelso Station.”

He replied to this with his usual silence, and it was beginning to get on Tina’s nerves.

Rex and Rasa came back, filling the tense space with their laughter and chatter. They had been to feed the geese, which lived in a pen next to the gym and the farm.

They sat down at the table, and Tina brought out the ubiquitous curry with eggs that no one complained of having to eat, because there was no alternative.

“Does it mean that when we go to the station, we need to pack up everything that’s in the habitats?” Rex asked.

“We do,” Tina said.

Rex groaned. “What are we going to do with all this stuff?” He spread his metal hands.

“It came out of the habitat’s storage, so that’s where it will have to go back. We’ll have a week or so to do that.”

“Even the farm and your cactuses?”

Well, that was a different issue altogether. The ship consisted of a central tube that held the control cabin and the four in-flight cabins, and this ensemble sat atop the engine.

Both sides of the ship sported two swinging arms that rotated in opposite directions. The arms were attached to the ship by a central access tube, and each led to a habitat section and a cargo section. The habitat section was attached to the longest part of the arm. On one side, there was the living room, kitchen and sleeping areas. The mirror on the other side held the gym, farm and showers. The shorter arm, attached to the farm habitat, held the recycling plant and other equipment, and on the mirror side held the cargo hold. This section had an extra airlock that could be hooked up to an access tube when the ship was docked at a station.

After they had finished dinner, Tina climbed up the tube to the zero-g part of the ship and descended the other tube into the gym.

The open-plan space contained a treadmill, a bike and a few racks of pull-up and pull down machines bathed in the glow of the warm light that hung above the growth benches. The installation consisted of racks of tubing that contained constantly circulating water. Lettuce, green beans, tomatoes, mini-cucumbers, salad cabbages in different colours, strawberries and herbs grew from little holes in the tops of the tubes.

When the ship was in mid-flight, the habitat was unfolded and both sides, each with a living space and a utility space on the opposite side of the beam, could be used, but now everything that was inside the living areas needed to be packed away. Things that couldn’t be packed needed to be moved to the cabins behind the control room, so that the revolving habitat could be folded for docking.

And while even the habitat was not huge, it was amazing how “not a lot of personal possessions” of four people could expand to fill the available space.

In the case of Tina’s cactuses, they literally had filled the space of their own accord.

When they needed to stow the habitat, the farm had to be emptied, because otherwise the water would go everywhere in zero-g. But the cupboard at the back held a water tank that would hold the nutrient-filled water, and the installation’s pipes came apart and fit neatly in the cupboard next to it. The tidiness of this ship was what had attracted Tina to buy it in the first place.

However, the prickly jungle on the far side of the room was going to be far more of a problem.

In the months of flight, while looking for something to do, Tina had grown them from the seeds she had rescued from her jacket, and they seemed to like the conditions so much that they now formed an impenetrable mass that occupied half the gym and solarium room.

Tina got off the bike and stood at the door, feeling both proud and terrified at the thought of having to move all of them. She knew that the best option was to discard them, but they reminded her of her home of so many years and symbolised Gandama in many ways: ugly, prickly, stubborn and very resilient.

Tina had put out the seeds just for fun, to remind her of home. She didn’t have enough proper growth medium, because the farm didn’t use it, so she used pellets from the materials recycler as anchoring substance and dried goose poo for fertiliser. Rex made up an installation of a rack of pipes with cups that held the substrate and tubes that circulated fresh air laced with nutrients over the roots. Being cactuses, they didn’t need much water, and were happy with a daily spray of humid air that was supplied to the more demanding edible vegetation that took up the other half of the growth chamber. It was just that those plants, the lettuces and little tomatoes, remained neatly in their pots. The cactuses did not. They wandered all over the gym.

Several even grew handfulls of fruit—something Tina had rarely seen in her fifteen years at Gandama. They didn’t appear to move quite as much as they had in her yard at Gandama, but displayed interesting growth forms Tina hadn’t observed before, with one of the plants deciding to grow leaves. They were broad, waxy ones, grey-blue in colour.

She didn’t want to discard them, even if she might have to lop some of them to fit into whatever space she could organise in the cabins behind the controls. There were four of those, two for sleeping and the rest for the stuff they needed to survive while the habitat was stowed and before they arrived at the station. They would have to go in with the geese.