“I want to go to Aurora,” Rex said.
Tina turned back to him, catching a glimpse out the window of the part of the ship that contained the controls. The habitat was at the end of one of two long beams that rotated constantly to give the passengers the semblance of gravity.
“Why do you want to go to Aurora?” she asked. But she thought she already knew: so that he could spend more money on gadgets. Wasn’t it funny she was out of cash but he still had all his pocket money saved up?
Rex flicked the magnifying lens he’d been using back into the top of the breastplate of his harness.
“Jens lives there,” he said.
“And Jens is…?” She had trouble keeping all his friends straight. They were all from the many forums that Rex frequented. Rex mentioned them sometimes, but Tina had no idea who they were or where they lived.
“Jens is the one who suggested that if we wanted the recycler to run more efficiently, we install the filter upside down and run the fan exhaust through the ice chamber twice. He can show us how to fix the inverter.”
That sounded attractive. Power supply in the habitat had been a constant battle that limped from one stopgap solution to the next. Tina swore she knew the ship so well because she’d been forced to find her way in the dark half the time. When the damn thing wasn’t working, Finn would give priority to the ventilation, since it kept them alive, and he and Rex would spend hours examining the habitat’s wiring to see why the thing kept crapping out, usually with Rasa holding up the emergency light.
She could write a long list of “don’ts” based on this trip, but the top one would be: don’t take a ship that’s been sitting unused in dock for fifteen years on a long interplanetary flight. The memory of that first time the ship almost missed the jump window because the phase alternator wanted to update its software was still etched in her mind.
Fixing the ship up properly sounded really good, especially since this friend Jens sounded like a capable mechanic. Being a friend might also entitle her to a cheaper rate, since her utter lack of funds was also going to catch up with them as soon as they came back into anything that resembled civilisation.
Finn, well-trained as he was as ship engineer, knew nothing about small ships. On board the behemoth Federacy Force supply ship SS Stavanger, his task had been to service the engines that ran coolant through the shell around the ship’s fusion chamber. Lacking a fusion chamber, the Alethia’s ion drive had stumped him with its “crude simplicity”, as he said.
Which Tina had learned to interpret as a translation for “I have no idea how it works”.
Finn didn’t like admitting defeat. He’d spent hours reading up. He’d gotten much better. But a broken part was still a broken part, no matter the skill of the mechanic.
“I still don’t like Aurora,” he said.
He had said this before, but now he was going to have to come up with a reason.
“From where I’m standing, it seems the most logical place to go of the two,” Tina said. “The pirates will be less in control of a station like Aurora, because it’s much bigger, and a lot of commercial flights are necessary just to keep everything running smoothly. If we’re going to keep our heads down, it will be much easier if there are a lot of other heads.”
“Haha.”
He said nothing for a while, but sipped his synthetic coffee. It was warm and tasted vaguely like the real thing, and, frankly, after months in space, any food tasted good because it was a distraction.
“Before I make a final decision, can you tell me why you have a problem with us going to Aurora, because there is not much point in hearing this after we have already made our choice.”
“I don’t have a problem with going there.”
“Sorry, I don’t believe that. Every time I raise the subject, you try to steer us away from making the decision to go there. It’s my preferred option. Rex wants to go there. We might be able to access a cheap mechanic there. What’s your objection?”
Over the humming of the ship, and the regular clicks as the arm with the habitat attached swung around, she could hear the honking of geese. Those damn things kept going day and night, and you could hear them everywhere when they got going. Their home was at the end of the ship’s second rotating arm. At least they provided eggs.
“It’s like this,” Finn finally said. “My father had some business interests at Aurora that went bad. There are some people at the station who are very sensitive to the Kaspari name.”
“You don’t have to go into the station and no one has to know that you’re on board our ship. I’ll be using my second identity. I don’t think there’s much of a chance that anyone finds out who we are. There are millions of people at Aurora, and our names will be just a line on the ship docket. We won’t go into the station except to buy supplies and refuel, and then we’ll be gone again. No one will know.”
“And what about this friend who fixes inverters?”
“That’s just a friend of Rex’s. He’s likely to be a fairly young fellow, probably someone who works in the docks or some other technical job.”
“There is never ‘just a friend’,” Finn said. “Everyone should be treated with suspicion, even the very young or the very old, the needy or the very rich. My family’s enemies have very convincing ways of getting even with people they don’t like. When you have money, you attract criminals. The more money,
