Project Charon 1: Re-entry by Patty Jansen

Author:Patty Jansen [Jansen, Patty]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

When Tina was as sure as she could be that Jake no longer watched her, she stopped to note “SF Manila” on her PCD.

SF stood for Star Fighter, an attack ship, much smaller than the behemoths like the Stavanger, which were glorified troop carriers, command centres and logistics providers. The Star Fighters did the work, and the ones of the Southeast Asia class were at the forefront. Their whereabouts were a secret. Their missions were a secret. Weapons they carried on board were secret. No wonder she’d been unable to find any information about Evelle other than some really generic stuff.

Evelle had just turned thirty. What would be her function on the Manila?

Whatever else had changed at Kelso Station, the office of the Port Authority was still more or less as it had been before. Nothing had changed about the large, low-ceilinged waiting room, where hundreds of people waited to be served at the counter at the far end.

Tina got a number from the old-fashioned machine, and sat down to wait.

Next to her, a couple of merchants were arguing over which of their allocations they would use for which part of their fruit. A couple of hawkers were plying their trades in the room. They were watched in turn by a number of security guards.

Tina knew that selling wares to people who were waiting here was not allowed, and the security guards’ supervisors had probably received some grease money for permitting it, so they were looking out for their supervisors in turn.

The two illegal hawkers, who were barely teenagers, were selling equipment cases, which one of them carried in a large net on his back.

As soon as his friend got to talk to a potential customer, he spread out a small folder which displayed all the different types of cases they had for sale.

On Tina’s other side, an entire family—a father, mother and five children and a grandmother and another man who might have been an employee or an uncle—had spread out on the floor with all of their belongings. They had so much stuff that they took up a whole row of seats and the floor surrounding them. The children were tired, and one of the little ones was asleep on the floor.

Tina remembered this room well. She remembered the stink of despair of it, of the despair of not knowing whether you could stay or had to go, not knowing whether you would get a permit, and the despair of other people trying to sell cheap things just so that they could make ends meet.

Tina usually kept out of the way of these people because she was alone, and because ship owners were considered to be privileged citizens. News travelled fast in these stations, and Tina hated people accosting her because they thought she had money.

Tina’s turn at the counter came when neither of the merchants nor the family with all the children had been seen yet. They had been there for much longer than she had, and it looked like they would be there for quite a while still.

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