THE TITAN EXPERIMENT

CHAPTER 22 - Dusk till Dawn (Luna Skye)

A week later in U.S. occupied Tijuana, Mexico, Luna Skye remembered how she arrived at her current location very well. She drove her 2017 Range Rover across four hours of barren Mexican highway, passing a truckload of workers on their way to a farm, an old man driving a pickup older than her SUV, and a poor family on the side of the road walking a goat on a leash. Part of her journey passed over crumbling asphalt and some of it over dirt roads kicking up clouds of dust in her rearview mirror. The entire trip took place with her windows down, one hand on the wheel and the other free to run her fingers through her hair or pat the side of the door to the beat of the radio.

She had spent the past week collecting rock and soil samples in the mountainous region of southern Baja California—searching for trace elements of recent meteor impacts. Her study, a grant funded by Next Gen, hoped to identify certain metals not found anywhere else on Earth. Potentially, the corporation could mine the same valuable metals from asteroids or comets in the near and far future. She imagined an enormous spaceship traveling to the asteroid belt, setting up a mining station, and digging for precious metals, used for a variety of purposes such as tank armor, delicate electronic components, and even deflector shields for colonization vessels destined for interstellar space.

But to Luna, a rock was a rock, whether from Montana or Mars. The work was in the blistering heat, tedious, and often unrewarding, but as a part-time professor in the geological sciences department at San Diego State University, this was a way of life, and a way to pay the bills. She would rather spend her time in the field than in a classroom any day. Even though the college wanted her to achieve tenure and increase her involvement in teaching, Luna was looking to go another direction. She didn't know what direction that was, but she would know it when she found it.

After her week in the arid mountains, she made her trek north into Tijuana, where she planned to stay for the night before heading back across the border to California the next morning.

To relax and unwind, she chose a bar on the popular main street, Avenida Revolucion. Souvenir shops, restaurants, and bars packed the Zona Rio district. Some of the drinking hotspots were on the lower end of the respectable scale. Like this one. But Luna didn't care. She could handle herself, and the alcohol, and the men gathered around the card table, staring at her with wantonness eyes. That said, she knew when to make for the exit.

She stared over the top of her cards, spreading them into a wide fan to hide her—I need to get my culo out of this rathole—face. Besides her need for amusement, she didn't have a reasonable explanation for how she found herself in a game of five-card draw with four men in a sleazy low-light establishment.

The booze. Yeah... that's how.

Somehow, all the other women in the nicotine-stained dump were wise enough to get lost after happy hour. Luna just wanted some extra spending money and a little entertainment after a hard day's work. But unfortunately, she was out of credit chips and pesos, and down to her last hand.

A pair of twos, an eight of diamonds, nine of spades, and a lonely king of clubs would not get her far. She chewed on the inside of her cheek while studying the expressions of her male counterparts. While keeping her eye on Juan—the man seated across from her—she took a slow and sensuous pull from the longneck bottle of a Corona as his gaze traced the outline of her white tank-top. Luna, with a drawn-out sigh of satisfaction from the beer tingling in her throat, set the bottle down, and slapped her cards flat on the table, face down.

She patted a hand on her leg in nervous contemplation.

Her eyes wandered down, falling to the object on the table.

She didn't plan on following through with the bet she made. With her other hand still on her leg, she allowed the slender chain of the gold pocket watch to slide over her fingers. It was a gift from her father, passed down through several generations of her family. Its sentimental value outweighed the small fortune it could bring as a classic timepiece. With a sad look of defeat meant to embolden the men at the table, she sighed and returned the pocket watch to her blue jeans... an act which drew a raised brow from Juan. She hoped they would underestimate her ability to handle herself in a pinch.