by Allen Steele
Four days after the Gold Dust Woman received the mayday from the Ritchie Explorer, the freighter came within visual range of the asteroid. Thirteen miles long, eight miles wide, Eros looks vaguely like an Idaho potato from which someone has taken a bite; at its midsection is a deep, scalloped depression, less like a crater than a gorge, from when it had apparently broken away from a larger asteroid countless years ago. Called Himeros, this was where the Explorer had anchored itself.
Asteroid mining rigs such as the Ritchie Explorer are called ships only because they have engines that enable them to move from one place to another. Other than that, they’re more like spacefaring versions of the offshore oil platforms that used to line the coasts of Earth’s oceans. About 70,000 tons in dry Earth-weight, the Explorer was an ugly, dust-covered hulk half-hidden by conduits, pipes, storage tanks, antennae, and cranes, with three fusion engines at one end and a hemispherical command module at its midsection. Eros was in its winter season, with the asteroid’s slow, end-over-end tumble on its spin axis causing Himeros to face away from the Sun, so the rig could only be seen by its red and green formation lights.
As the Gold Dust Woman approached Eros, Henry Zimmerman repeated his radio calls, continually hailing the Explorer while Lesley fired maneuvering thrusters to bring the freighter alongside the asteroid and match spins with it. As before, there was no response…and when the Woman finally achieved a parallel position about 2,000 feet above Himeros, its crew saw why.
“It looked like a bomb had gone off down there,” Henry says. “The command module dome was almost completely blow away. It was like…” He pauses, thinking of a way to describe it. “If you made a bowl out of aluminum foil, turned upside-down, then lit a firecracker underneath it…that’s what you’d get.”
“The moment I saw that,” Ko says, “I knew this wasn’t a rescue mission any more. We were just going in there to find the bodies. There was no way anyone could have lived through whatever happened down there.”
Nevertheless, Captain Zimmerman proceeded as if lives were at stake and the clock was ticking. According to the database, the rig’s six-person crew was an extended family, three married couples who’d joined together to form a clan under a common surname. This practice is not unusual aboard Pax deep-space vessels; quite often, the clans are also the consortiums that own and operate their ships. In this instance, the Owlsley clan was listed as being the owner-operators of the Ritchie Explorer: David and Kathryn Dolan-Owlsley, the captain and first mate respectively; Sean and Clay Connor-Owlsley, the chief engineer and operations manager; and Keith and Jane Wetherill-Owlsley, both surface-operations technicians. According to their profiles, all were experienced spacers; it was possible that a few may have survived in some airtight compartment out of reach from the long-range com.
Because the Woman’s reactor boom jutted out at right-angles from the rest of the ship, there was no way the freighter could hard-dock with the rig. To make matters more difficult, the Explorer’s primary docking hatch was occupied by its skiff, thereby preventing the Woman from sending over her own skiff; compounding the mystery was the fact that the Explorer’s two three-person lifeboats were still in their berths as well. So reaching the rig wouldn’t be simple.
After a brief discussion, Henry Zimmerman consented to let Quon Ko make an untethered spacewalk over to the rig. It was a dangerous task; Ko would be using an EVA maneuvering pack, and the slightest misfire of its control thrusters could mean that he’d mismatch his spin relative to those of both the Woman and the Explorer and either tumble away into space or, worse, smash headlong into Eros at hundreds of feet per second. Ko had logged hundreds of hours in spacewalks, though, and had practiced this particular ship-to-ship jump before.
Lesley would later confess to biting her nails to the quick, but Ko made the jump without incident. “The trick is, you don’t look where you’re going,” he says. “If you did, you’d get dizzy and screw up. So you keep your eye on the heads-up the whole time and just do it.”
He came down near a small service airlock located on the Explorer’s starboard side, just above one of the four massive anchor pods on the rig’s underside that held the rig to the asteroid. Not far away was the hollow shaft of the primary drill; within the dim illumination of the formation lights, Ko could see that the drum-like shaft was sunk within the asteroid, a certain indication that the chemical laser bore had been deployed.
Ko found the airlock hatch, and it was then, within the halogen beams of his helmet lamps, that he noticed a safety line tethered to a rung next to the hatch. The slim slender rope lay limp from hatch, falling down the adjacent ladder until it reached the ground, where it trailed away into the darkness. Ko used a flashlight from his belt to give the safety line a quick glance; there was nothing at the end of the line except another tether hook, but he also noted footprints scattered along the dark grey regolith beneath it. Little more than two dozen impressions, they went away from the rig and didn’t come back. There appeared to be more than one set of footprints, but it was hard to tell for sure whether more than one person was responsible for them.
“I had a hunch all this was significant,” Ko would later tell the board of inquiry, “so before I went in through the airlock, I took plenty of pictures. Particularly the footprints, before they got messed up by anyone else.”
To avoid disturbing what might be a major clue, Quon Ko clung to the ladder as much as possible while he opened the airlock, setting his own feet on the ground only once. That was made possible by Eros’s very slight surface gravity. At less than .002-g, one would have to remain still for a long time in order to stand erect; even a dropped object took a minute or more to slowly drift to a rest.
Once he entered the airlock, the first thing Ko did was to check the interior pressure gauge. He was startled to find nothing but hard vacuum on the other side. It appeared that the Explorer had suffered a catastrophic blowout that had voided even lower decks. “Automatic pressure doors should’ve come down,” he says, “unless the explosion was such that the comps were instantly knocked offline. In that case…” He stops, shakes his head. “When something like that happens, there’s no hope. You’re dead before you even hear the alarms.”
There seemed to be emergency power, though, so with Henry’s permission, Ko disengaged the airlock fail-safes, then pried open the inside hatch. An emergency ceiling lamp had been lit in the adjacent ready-room, and beneath its amber glow Ko found another clue. Two skinsuits were missing from the lockers; the other four were still in place, and when Ko checked their name patches, he saw that they belonged to David and Kathryn Dolan-Owlsley and Sean and Clay Connor-Owlsley. Which meant it was Keith and Jane Wetherill-Owlsley who’d left through the airlock and not come back.
“When Ko found this,” Lesley says, “I figured, ‘Okay, that’s it. We’re going to find everyone else’s bodies somewhere in the rig.’ In fact, I started bracing myself for just that…even grabbing the med kit so that I’d have a sedative patch handy.”
For Ko, the situation was different. Professional spacers speak of moments of surrealism that sometimes occur during stressful EVAs; they become hyper-conscious of the fact that they’re seeing the world through a helmet faceplate, and it suddenly seems as if they’ve become living cameras. “Distancing” is the expression most often used; you’re there, but it’s as if you’re not quite there.
This is what happened to Quon Ko as he made his way through the Ritchie Explorer. Climbing up the ladder from the airlock, he found the passageway that led him to the crew quarters. As he’d suspected, the emergency pressure doors hadn’t dropped; one by one, he entered compartments completely absent of atmospheric pressure. In the sanguine red tint of the ceiling lamps, he saw the damage caused by the blowout: food cans torn from galley shelves and strewn across the deck, clothes ripped from closet hangers, shredded paper thrown everywhere like confetti…and across it all, a thin layer of frost, where water vapor had instantly frozen out and become a patina of ice.<
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One small detail he’d come to remember. On the floor of one of the staterooms lay a paperback book, its cover torn and frosted-over but its title still readable: Basics of Rock Climbing. Perhaps because the book was so out of place, it stuck in his mind.
Yet there were no bodies. Like Lesley, Ko expected to find corpses. Even if two of the missing crewmen had been on EVA when the disaster occurred, it still meant that the remaining four should have been inside the rig; the lifeboats were in place, as was the skiff, so it was clear that no one had abandoned ship. Yet just as it was apparent that the rig had lost internal pressure before the emergency hatches could be sealed, so it also became obvious that no one would be found belowdecks.
Leaving the crew quarters, Ko crossed the short passageway that took him into the rig’s industrial section. When he came to the place where the ladder to the command module should have been located, though, he found himself at the edge of a gaping hole. A blast crater yawned in the center of the rig: nearly a dozen feet in diameter, it was practically bottomless, or at least as far he could tell from the beams his helmet lamps. This was the site of the onboard explosion, the effects of which the Woman’s crew had seen from above. Judging from the way the torn metal edges of the crater were bent upwards, it appeared that the blast had happened somewhere below.
As Ko peered into the abyss, Henry and Lesley hastily pulled up the Explorer’s schematics from the Woman’s database. It was then that they discovered that the rig’s primary drill was positioned directly below the command module. It looked as if the drill had hit something deep underground that had caused the explosion, the force of which had blown straight upward into the rig itself.
There was nowhere else to search for survivors except the bridge. Rather than spend time searching for another ladder, Ko took the most direct approach: firing his EVA backpack, he carefully used its jets to glide up the crater to the top deck. “I could’ve left the rig entirely,” Ko says. “The ceiling was almost totally gone…when I got up there, I saw almost nothing but stars above me.”
The compartment was a wreck, only a handful of lights glimmering on the sole control panel that remained operational. Indeed, the final report issued by the Pax review board would conclude that it was only a miracle that the Ritchie Explorer had been able to transmit the mayday received by the Gold Dust Woman; with most of the comps instantly knocked off-line by the explosion, only the emergency transmitter, which was located elsewhere on the platform and powered by its own battery, was left intact.
Still, nothing prepared Quon Ko for what he found. When the ovals cast by his helmet lamp found a black stikshoe wedged beneath the base of an upended chair, his first thought was that it was empty. But then he moved a little closer, and saw that the shoe was crusted with red ice. A foot, roughly severed just above the ankle, was caught within the shoe.
This was the only human remnant found aboard the Ritchie Explorer.
Captain Zimmerman immediately sent word to Ceres Station, which in turn urgent requests to the Martian Pride and the Ulysses that they come to the Gold Dust Woman’s assistance. By then, both vessels were nearly two weeks away from Eros, time enough for news of the disaster to reach Earth.
Journalists often say that the public pays little attention to what goes on in space until something goes wrong, and this is true more often than not. When space exploration became less about discovery and more about commerce, the only people on Earth who continued to closely watched what was happening out there were investors, lien holders, and insurance companies, along with the handful of amateur enthusiasts who still care about such things. This tends to change, though, whenever something unusual occurred…and in space, an unusual occurrence is almost always something that takes its toll in lives.
So Quon Ko hadn’t even returned to the Woman before the first reports of what he’d found aboard the Explorer appeared in the news media back on Earth. Within twenty-four hours, about half of the world’s inhabitants, along with nearly 100 percent of the lunar and Martian colonists, were aware of the mysterious loss of six lives aboard an asteroid mining rig. To be sure, most of those same four and a half billion people would forget all about the Explorer and its crew within ten days, for nothing is as fickle as the attention of the media mass-mind. But for the moment, the Ritchie Explorer was the top-of-the-hour lead story.
It wasn’t just that six people had been killed. It was also that those six people were missing, with nothing more than a severed foot to show for them. Among the countless experts, real and self-proclaimed, who took turns espousing opinions both educated and ignorant, the more well-informed pointed out that, even if most of the crew had been blown out into space by the explosion—the cause of which was, itself, a major mystery—then Eros’s gravity would assert its pull upon their corpses, and the bodies would therefore eventually be found and recovered. And they were right; over the course of the next few weeks, searchers from the Pride and the Ulysses located the torn and frozen bodies of the Dolan-Owlsleys and the Connor-Owlsleys, each floating in space not far from Eros. However, the disappearance of Keith and Jane Wetherill-Owlsley remained both unsolved and unexplained.
Then there was the explosion itself: what caused it, and why hadn’t the crew been able to prevent it? This took much longer to figure out; in fact, it wasn’t until a year later, when the Pax Astra dispatched an investigative team to Eros, that a cause was definitely determined. Even then, it was something that surprised even accredited experts: the Explorer’s laser drill had apparently hit a methane pocket deep within Eros. Such gas pockets are sometimes found within type-C asteroids, but are practically unknown among type-S rocks. Indeed, most media commentators had already ruled this out as a possibility. But the findings of the Pax investigation were conclusive: the explosion had occurred the instant Explorer’s laser pierced the rock surrounding the pocket and ignited the volatile gas, and the resultant blast had gone straight up the mine shaft to devastate the rig above.
These things took a while to discover, though, and until then the imps of the net came out to play. People of our time take pride in their sophistication, but that doesn’t mean that the superstitions of the past have vanished. Thus it wasn’t long before someone mentioned the Great Galactic Ghoul.
Perhaps it was inevitable that the Ghoul would be remembered. Nothing lives quite as long as a myth, particularly when it takes the form of a ghost story to be told around the flames of a virtual campfire. And the Great Galactic Ghoul was no mere legend; he had a long history behind him, one that could be accessed with only a few keystrokes. The fact that the Ghoul had originally been a joke was forgotten; like the Loch Ness Monster, foo fighters, or Big Foot, he gradually took on a life of his own.
Sterling Crow, the Nettimes star commentator, was the first to mention the Ghoul. That was appropriate; Crow was not only knowledgeable enough to be aware of the Ghoul, but also gullible enough to indict him as a possible culprit. Since most of Crow’s viewers watch his show only for its unintentional humor, the majority of them don’t take him seriously…but The Morning Crow boasts a daily audience of 60 million, so even the minority who accept Crow’s ravings at face value is a significant figure.
Shortly afterwards, The Public Inquisitor ran a story claiming that a senior Pax Astra official, who’d insisted upon anonymity, had told the site that “a mysterious alien entity” was responsible for the Explorer disaster, and that Pax investigators believed this entity to be the Great Galactic Ghoul. The Inquisitor went on to say that the Ghoul had been blamed for spacecraft disappearances as long as a hundred years ago, and both American and Russian officials of the last century had covered up the creature’s existence. Again, while most people don’t take the Inquisitor seriously, quite a few do, and so its story helped push the Great Galactic Ghoul further into the public consciousness.
Seeing what was coming out of the rumor mill, the Pax hastily released reports of what the Gold Dust Woman, the Martian Pride, and the Ulysses had found thus far.
By then, however, theories about what had really happened to the Ritchie Explorer had already appeared in the news media. There hadn’t been a mine shaft explosion; instead, the blast had been the result of an energy beam fired by another spacecraft, one doubtless of extraterrestrial origin. The six missing crew members weren’t dead, but had been abducted instead; even after four of them were eventually found, the fact that two were still unaccounted for only helped to fuel this particular hearsay. The Ghoul had been gone for a long time, yes, but only because he’d been asleep on Eros; the Ritchie Explorer had disturbed him, and so he’d reacted by wiping those who’d trespassed on his domain.
All this might have been harmless, were it not for the fact that the scare may have contributed to the outbreak of the System War. Royalists within the Pax—notably Lucius Robeson, who’d later become Queen Macedonia’s Chief of Naval Intelligence once the New Ark Party was overthrown and the Pax became a constitutional monarchy—were quick to claim that the Explorer disaster wasn’t an accident at all, but rather an act of war by the TBSA. The TBSA hotly denied this, of course, and Robeson had nothing to back up his allegations. Nevertheless, insurance premiums on ships traveling between Earth and Mars soared to an all-time high, and some vessels began to add weapons their captains thought they’d never need. It wasn’t just the idea that ships might be attacking one another, though. There was also the prospect—however remote or absurd it might seem—that there really was a Great Galactic Ghoul lurking out there. So when actual hostilities broke out between the Pax and the TBSA a few years later, vessels on both sides were already armed with ship-to-ship missiles.