Project Charon 1Re-Entry

Chapter 2

Chapter Two

It was afternoon and too late for Tina to go into town to find anyone who might be able to lend her money. The offices would still be open by the time she made the twenty-minute drive there, but these types of people wouldn't see her without an appointment, and it would take too long to arrange one. Because in Gandama one did not make any unannounced visits to financial people. They might think you’d come to rob them.

She would have to go tomorrow morning, and a feeling of panic clamped around her heart. That was one day of the three she had to raise the money.

Three days—it was ridiculous. And did he really suggest he was going to use threats to get his money if she didn’t comply? What would that achieve? She couldn’t make any money where there wasn’t any.

She opened the drawer and took out the computer that still displayed the financial program. Tina had written it herself, and it plotted out in detail how much money she needed to earn to pay off enough of her loan by the time Rex was twenty-one to give him a comfortable life. She would give him the shop, the house and the little sanctuary she had built for him.

But this ridiculous request upset everything.

Her shop account held enough to pay her bills, her suppliers and her regular loan repayment. Her personal accounts held enough money to survive, a bit extra to pay for any unforeseen doctor visits or repairs.

But the column labelled “Debts and assets” was still in the red to the extent of ninety-seven thousand credits, the outstanding debt on the shop and the land.

Where in the world would she raise that much in this little time?

Unless—no, she would have to leave the shop and she couldn’t do that. And it wouldn’t be possible within three days anyway.

She shoved the computer back into the drawer. If she wasn't successful, then there was no point in doing these books. She would have to sell the shop, and abandon all the work she had put into making it a place where Rex could move around freely.

She abandoned any attempt at the accounts, and went out the back to the yard.

At this time of the day, the sun was behind the house, creating an area of shade at the bottom of the steps. The air was still searing hot, exuding the omnipresent smell of hot dust that one only noticed when it was missing.

In a previous life, the building had served as mechanic shop, and the owner used to store his parts and clapped-out vehicles here. Tina had tidied it all up, built a pergola against the back fence, with paving where Rex used to practice with his harness, because back when he was clumsy, he would often trip and upset the furniture.

These days the area contained a little bench and a table surrounded by her extensive garden of desert plants, where the cactuses could move about safely without having to worry about attacks by armadillos, which ate cactuses.

It also contained a small outdoor research station: a table with boxes of jars and cutting implements, a drying oven and chemical supplies for preparing samples. The gene decoder stood inside. It was a second-hand model, bought from a school in Peris City, but Tina still didn’t want it exposed to the elements, even if it rarely rained out here.

It was a bit early, but Tina unrolled the hose from the hook next to the door, connected it to the tap and turned it on. Even though they had no leaves, she swore that the cactuses trembled with anticipation for the spray of diamond drops to hit their fronds.

The few scientists who had investigated Gandama’s cactuses prior to Tina’s arrival had concluded that the creatures weren’t really smart. They had more in common with plants than animals. Their apparent sentience was due to differences in temperature and moisture that prompted physical reactions within the plant that looked like it was walking in very slow motion.

But as biologist herself, and one who had studied alien life at that, Tina knew that it wasn’t so simple.

Why, for example, did they all congregate at the bottom of the steps at this time of the day? They had only started doing so after she had started watering them, and only after they had stopped freezing up at the first sign of movement, because armadillos took their movement as a cue that this was some item of food. For years the cactuses had learned to stay still while something moved, and now they had learned within a generation that it was all right to move around in her garden. Not only that, they had established that at this time of day she was likely to come outside to water them.

Tina couldn’t water them too much, because they gorged themselves to the point where the branches lost structure. The greedy things would take all they could get.

As she sprayed the fine mist over the garden, some of the smaller, hairy cactuses followed her around. Like most of the cactuses, they had long tentacles that looked like roots, which they used to hold themselves up, and to seek water and nutrients. They looked like slow-moving octopuses. Very slow-moving octopuses.

Why on earth would the lender want to buy the cactuses?

They were a curiosity, known only from this area of desert around Gandama. People in Peris City spent good money for them, and Tina only sold them to true collectors who looked after them properly. Every week or so, she would bundle some of the young ones into a box, wrap them up in moist paper, and send them to her contact in the city. Every week, he would pay her. And as the value of trade in Gandama had gone down, these payments had gone up.

She couldn’t afford to lose this collection and all the work she had put into breeding the pretty ones with the white hair, and the ones with the yellow hair, and the grey ones with the red stripes on the trunks.

At first, it had been an interest, to keep her skills in biology up and prevent her from sliding into depression. She’d found out how they bred, that their chromosomes existed in triple helix DNA strands, and that two strands were fairly similar but the third strand contained a lot of mutations. Factors in the environment determined whether they bred with the mutated or the regular strand. It was quite extraordinary.

They were also chemical powerhouses, exuding all kinds of defensive chemicals when threatened, not that this did them any good against armadillos, because those had a very poor sense of smell.

She had even written a paper about the creatures and got it accepted into an academic journal. It would be published soon.

She was proud of the work, because no one had paid her to do it. Incredible that no one had written anything before about these remarkable organisms that could control their future breeding. Within one generation, they could become something entirely different.

Tina had released most of the experimental cactuses back into the wild, even if some kept coming back to her house, but had kept the most unusual ones, including the ones she had bred, in her back yard.

But while they were certainly curious creatures and collectors paid a lot for them, Tina struggled to see their value for someone like Simon Fosnet. Oh yes, if she still worked for the Federacy, they would be able to do something with the research. So would big pharmaceutical companies on worlds like Olympus, the home of PharmaCom and Schweitzer. They had the money to have giant gene labs. But Gandama? Peris City? No.

And these companies knew nothing of her work. The research hadn’t even been published yet.

She was sure: it was not about the cactuses. This was just a way for the owner to pry into her business.

If she let him take the cactuses, that meant that he would have to come into her back yard, and he would be able to spy on her. If he took enough lackeys to move the collection, they might even create enough chaos to steal something. Not money, but her customer database, and the names of her suppliers.

People in this place did those sorts of things. Only a few days ago, Janusz had come in and offered to work for the shop “because he didn’t think Rex should be seeing customers”.

Tina had asked whatever issue he had with her customers seeing Rex, and he said that “It wasn’t right.”

Too right, it wasn’t, but that had nothing to do with Rex. They wanted to know what illegal things she did, because her business was still making a profit, and therefore there had to be something illegal.

In all of the fifteen years that Tina had lived here, Janusz had never been friendly. He was a suspicious man, always keen to get some advantage out of someone else's misfortune. He’d dress it up as “helping out”, but it sounded more like helping himself.

Maybe he’d known about the lender’s visit in advance because he’d met the man in town. Maybe he wanted to be close when she received the demand for the return of the loan.

Tina wouldn’t be surprised if he wanted to buy the shop himself.

And as much as Tina wasn’t selling the cactuses, she also did not want Janusz to have the shop. Because he had never done anything deserving of a favour. And he hated cactuses.

Still it didn’t make sense to her that giving the cactuses, or, through them, access to the shop, would be worth forfeiting the money she owed.

Come to think of it, that whole setup smelled like a trap. And she wasn’t going to blunder in. There had to be a catch, a road they wanted her to take, even if she couldn’t yet see where it would lead her.

Nowhere good.

The shop was hers and would stay hers. The stock was hers. The cactuses were hers.

So she made the appointments with financial offices in town. She tidied the shop’s books, cringing at those hideous red figures: ninety-seven thousand credits worth of dust.

When she came here, life in this area had been full of optimism. The hamlet of Dickson’s Creek had been intended as an outpost of Gandama, with the space in between slated to be filled in with housing.

Needless to say, that had never happened. The optimism had long gone. People were leaving this area. Bands of rogues and criminals roamed the desert and increasingly infiltrated the towns. Her business might be profitable because of those very criminals, but the value of her remaining loan was greater than the value of the property if it had to be sold today. No one was going to finance this.

She leaned her head in her hands. She’d go into town tomorrow, but it was highly likely all a futile exercise.

What was she going to do? What could she do in three days?

A whirring noise drifted from the workshop. What was Rex doing? She’d better have a look.