“It smells like the inside of a refrigerator," Neil said, as he lifted it off.
"And metal. It's all this frost and space-smell," I said. Something that's been exposed to space acquires a very peculiar metallic odor.
It took a few days for the ship to warm up. When we began to move gold, Sanjay and I served as the bucket brigade, with Neil in his moon suit manning the airlock. The job went slower than I had hoped. The airlock was designed for automatic operation, and using the handcrank was inefficient. Nevertheless, it was nice to work in a short-sleeve shirt. The only drawback was the inability to escape easily. I hadn't forgotten my dream, and the engine compartment door had been left open to release the water, allowing that eerie blue light to flicker out.
The water floated out in globules. There was nothing sensitive in the hold, so we just let it accumulate. It would either coalesce on the walls, or sometimes a blob the size of a basketball would jellyfish past to be captured by an engineer named Roberts. He'd net them in bags and leave them in the airlock to be disposed of when we were conveying gold. He must have done that a thousand times before the engine compartment finally stopped leaking.
When it did, Roberts volunteered to go in first. I don't know whether he had more guts than the others or whether they felt he deserved it for being the waterboy. Whatever it was, what happened next has bothered me ever since.
"He's ready to go in," Janet said as we gathered near the steel door leading to the engineering compartment.
The Cherenkov light was a warning. There might be more dangerous forms of radiation inside, so Roberts donned a moon suit to take advantage of its shielding. He pulled the heavy door open. The interior had the eerie look of a fish aquarium in a room with no other lights on. I grabbed a moon helmet and switched on its comms, hoping we could receive him through the thick bulkhead.
"It's laid out as in the ship’s blueprints," he said. "I'm in a room with three doorways. The left leads to the exhaust nozzle feeds, the center to the engine access panels, and the right to the main engineering control compartment. The Cherenkov light is coming from there. I'm going through the door. Reading no dangerous radioactivity. There is. . . ."
And that was it. The blue light went out, and he fell silent. Worried that he might have been injured, Neil and I suited up and charged in. We found nothing. He had disappeared without a trace.
We presumed him dead three days later and held a service. I never really knew anything about him other than the idle conversations you have while working on a ship with someone. We had nothing to commit to space, so we took the only thing from his quarters that seemed to have meaning to Roberts: a well-worn copy of Ulysses by James Joyce, with copious notes written in the margins. I suspected that there was more to Roberts than anyone knew.
In the weeks that followed we carefully explored the engineering compartment. Whatever took Roberts wasn't there anymore. There was also no trace of the crew. We had seen every part of the ship, at least at a glance, and one thing was clear: there were no crew members on that ship when it decompressed. However, if Roberts could disappear mysteriously, they might have too.
We were out of our league. People do not simply vanish into thin air. Janet suggested that a malfunctioning reactor could vaporize a person, but there was no evidence of that, and none of the reactors in that room had power. No one liked suggestions of a new phenomenon in nature, and all we had left that might provide an answer was Nelson's logs.
Unfortunately, we couldn't find them. Like everything else in the databanks, they were hidden in some obscure folder, probably in the middle of a program file. Rather than spending months combing through the computer's files, we hoped there would be something in the government records on Earth that might help.
I contacted Ed Iron, who sent his researcher to the archives and got back to us after a few days. As it turned out, hiding files was standard military procedure at the time of the ship's loss. They sent us a key, but it wasn't necessary. They hadn’t told anyone that they possessed the logs themselves from the beginning to the end of the mission. They sent a copy to the Hyperion.
That stood in direct contradiction to the commission report, which claimed that the logs were never transmitted home. It confirmed that there was indeed a cover-up, and it also explained why the communications equipment on the derelict was set to transmit.
With the scholars busy poring over the logs, I was able to enjoy a reprieve from their insistent requests to be allowed on the derelict. I didn't have time to read the logs. I needed to focus on removing the gold, though I was astonished that the UNAG had given them to us. I guess they figured that we'd eventually ferret them out of the computer anyway.
We had removed most of the gold by the beginning of the month. Only a relatively small amount remained onboard the derelict, so I left the job of transferring it to Sanjay and Janet while Neil and I returned to the Amaranth Sun. There had been no further manifestation of the blue light or other strange occurrences. It would only be a few more days before I had little choice except to unleash the academic specialists for the study phase of the mission. Webb would have Ed Iron countermand my orders if I didn't. I didn't mind, though. My part of the mission was nearly over, and I could relax while academicians completed their study under Webb's leadership. It would be his baby after the gold was unloaded.
I was preparing for a meeting to update the Amaranth Sun's crew when a message came through. "Hunter, nice trick, spinning the Cape Hatteras like that!" Finley Pace said as he broke radio silence and made his presence known. Apparently he had maneuvered in behind us after I had transferred to my ship. For a second time we hadn't been on the lookout and were caught off-guard. I had left the job of detecting approaching ships to the Hyperion's superior equipment. That proved to be my biggest mistake of the entire salvage operation.
"Not much you can do now. It's mine. We've got two ships to your one, and I've got directional thrusters on the Cape Hatteras," I said. "You won't win this one."
Keating’s voice then came over the radio. "I'm sorry, Cam. Ed signed a bad contract. Most of my cut would have gone to the owners of my ship. My core crew would have received little more than peanuts from those greedy bastards. I can't let that happen."
Keating had defected. I probably should have suspected when the day before he had asked to dismantle the corridor between our ships. I had assumed that he simply wanted better maneuverability. The tiny Amaranth Sun could do nothing against two salvors. Even worse, the scholars had made it less than halfway through Nelson's logs, and I had never bothered to transfer a copy to my ship. With the Hyperion gone, I had no access to them.
Chapter 12 Day 217
"December 8, 2259. Log of Captain John Andrew Nelson, Commanding Officer, UNAG Mining Vessel Cape Hatteras. In synchronous orbit with the asteroid 974-Bernhard. Seventeen days from completing operations. The mission is a success. We have already begun preparations for the voyage home."
Keating spent most of the day transferring the remaining academicians and much of his crew to the Cape Hatteras using his pressurized corridor. I could hear his announcements on the radio. He convinced them to go freely by declaring that I had opened the ship, and he suggested a tour for all personnel to be led by Dr. Webb. Webb fell for it. He was always ready for an opportunity to pontificate.
I couldn't contact anyone.The Cape Hatteras lacked working communications, and Finley had our transmissions jammed. I tried in vain to send a Morse message with the Amaranth Sun's spotlights, but no one was watching. All I could do was observe as the traitor marooned most of the expedition's unsuspecting personnel. When he was finished, Keating was left with a few loyal crew members and most of the gold.
I wasn't worried about the safety of the people aboard the Cape Hatteras, other than the possibility of someone else disappearing. They would be fine until Ed Iron's tow ship arrived. I don't think Keating wanted them dead: I saw his crew transferring supplies to the derelict.
The whole thing was a s
et-up from the moment Ed rented that ship. Pace knew most of the captains in the business, including David Keating. He also knew that the Hyperion was the most likely ship for Ed Iron to rent, being the newest and the best. All Pace had to do was to contact Keating and cut a deal over a secured channel.
But there was still one problem remaining: me. I was on the bridge of the Amaranth Sun with Stacey, Kurt, and Neil trying to figure out what to do when another message came through.
"Alright, Cam, you've got a choice. I know you haven't been able to contact Earth, and by the time that tow ship gets here, we'll be rich and retired in the outer solar system. You can let us board your ship so we can disable your engines, or I can ram you. Either way, no one will ever know where this gold went. I'd prefer option two, but I'll give you the chance to save your crew," Pace said.
"You'll just have to kill us, Finley, and dent up that pretty ship of yours."
He didn't respond but just rolled his ship in our direction. I had to act fast. He was much closer than in our previous encounter.
"Stacey, engines, full thrust, any direction!"
"I have a reinforced bow for ramming," announced Pace, "and I've tossed out every bit of extra weight. I'm a fast accelerator now, and your little exploration scow isn't. This is your last chance."
"Not going to happen, Finley" I said. "When I get done trashing your name, they wouldn't commission you to haul iron from the moon."
"I won't need it. I'm as good as retired," he responded.
"We'll see about that."
You're supposed to accelerate a ship like the Amaranth Sun incrementally, but you've got more power if you need it for towing and other heavy jobs. We'd already exceeded its design guidelines the first time we escaped Finley Pace, and I knew its frame wouldn't tolerate too many more fast punches of speed. We were no longer pulling anything, so when Stacey slammed the throttle to 110%, it sent us all against the back walls of the ship. Hard.
I smacked my head squarely against a light fixture. Shaking it off, I realized that Pace had missed us. If we didn't slow down, he couldn't catch us once we were at full speed. Next came something terribly painful to watch: the NASA probe had broken loose from that jolt of acceleration and was floating freely. It looked helpless, like a small animal about to get run over by a bus. A small jet of hydrazine fired from Finley's ship, signalling that he had altered course to make sure he hit it. The probe pancaked across his bow and slid off.
I had no idea what I'd tell the Smithsonian. The weren't going to be happy, and I prayed that they'd be satisfied with the probe's chemical rocket assembly still strapped to the Amaranth Sun’s stern.
The immediate question was where we should go. If we went back to Earth, Pace would have the Hyperion in the safety of the outer planets before we could intercept him with a military patrol. We couldn't go back to the derelict. There wasn't much we could have do there except dodge Finley's salvor until he eventually got lucky and smashed us. Worse, he might threaten to ram the Cape Hatteras and kill everyone onboard. No amount of gold was worth taking that risk, so I knew I had to stay away—at least for the time being.
The only thing I could think to do was to stay ahead of him. I knew the Hyperion had enough fuel to return to Earth with that load, but Pace didn't have enough to make it much further. If he were going to reach one of the rogue colonies, he would have to refuel. There were only two places he could do that, Jupiter and Saturn, and by pure chance they were lined up with each other in their orbits.
Our best chance was to catch him at Jupiter. If we went there and hired thugs, we could get him when he made his stop. If he slipped past us, we might have another try at Saturn if I could find ships fast enough to overtake him. I wanted to be wherever he stepped off his ship, backed by 50 guys with crowbars at the ready.
Jupiter has two major colonies: Europa and Callisto. Io was never colonized, and Ganymede's settlement consisted of an isolationist religious cult. Because Callisto was a major UNAG outpost, I knew that Pace wouldn't go there. They'd want to do an inspection, and the gold was bound to raise interest. That left Europa.
The Europans would never search him on principle. They were pariah drug dealers who had their own problems with their ships being searched. They would sell him fuel without any questions asked, so I had Stacey set a course for Europa. I didn't think there would be a problem finding ships. Most cargo vessels are faster than an empty salvor, and I might even be able to find an armed one, since many of the Europan ships had been carrying laser weaponry ever since the mysterious pirates robbed them. Pace's ship might have become lighter and faster, but the Hyperion was weighed down with the gold. Pace wouldn't let that ship out of his sight, so that effectively slowed both of his ships down.
Pace had jammed our signal by using some kind of high-energy beam to haze over the optical coatings on our transmitter, cutting our outgoing signal strength to almost nothing. Europa would have a paycomm location, and their people could fix the transmitter, but it still took three weeks to get there, and I knew that Ed would be very anxious after losing contact. The first message he would get from me would be terrible news. I wasn't looking forward to dealing with that, but then again it was Ed, not I, who had hired Keating.
When we arrived at Europa, I figured we had a two-week window to prepare. I contacted the surface. They barely received our transmission, leading to a long exchange of garbled statements and requests for repeats. They said they'd have a robotic repair drone out to fix the transmitter within a few days. It took them hours to send a tender to pick us up, and when it did arrive the pilot appeared intoxicated.
"I'm Randy, boys, and I'll be your pilot," he said with a slur.
"I'm a girl," Stacey said.
"I hadn't noticed," he said before launching into a boisterous laugh. He had long, gray hair in a loose ponytail, an unkempt beard, and thick glasses. I'd never seen anyone wear glasses other than in photographs from centuries ago.
We boarded the tender, leaving Kurt to mind the Amaranth Sun. I looked forward to visiting the colony. They had recently renamed it New San Francisco, and despite its reputation it was one of the more interesting places in the solar system.
"Care for a little toot?" Randy asked, hitting a button on his console that dropped masks from the ceiling which emitted smoke instead of emergency oxygen. I didn't have to guess what it was.
"No thanks!" I said.
"Well, more for us," Randy said as he hit the button again, stowing the other masks. From the well-used one in front of his face he took a hit, pushed it out of the way, pulled a flask from his front shirt pocket, and handed it to me. "How about a little heart of the tarpotch?"
I took a sip out of politeness. It was potently alcoholic.
"Well, here I go again. Hold on," Randy said, with a hint of anxiety in his voice. He hit the gas and started moving away from the Amaranth Sun. "I get this right most of the time," he muttered.
"Now hold on," I said, trying to sound good-humored while still posing a serious question. "What happens when you don't get it right?"
"Oh hell, nothing. I'm not dead at the bottom of a crater yet. I just don't want to tear off a part of your ship," he said as he looked backwards past us, frantically changing views to see the Amaranth Sun through the portholes of his ship.
"Parallel parking was not my strong point," he added.
He flicked a switch that pushed us back into our seats. Europa doesn't have much of an atmosphere, so we careened toward it with nothing to slow us down. We could see the colony approaching fast. Just when it appeared certain that we would crash, Randy let out another boisterous laugh and braked so hard that anyone not smart enough to wear a seatbelt might have ended up with a permanent imprint of a control panel on their face.
We settled into a hangar situated to the side of a small structure in front of the largest dome.
"Well, there we be," Randy said, holding his hand out for the fare. I gave him 30 UNAG dollars in gold foil. He put it in his pocket
and held out his hand again for a tip. He grunted approvingly when I gave him 20 percent.
"Enjoy! Be sure to drink the water!" he said, following it with another obnoxious laugh as we stepped into the corridor leading to the dome.
Chapter 13 Day 238
"December 18, 2259. Log of Captain John Andrew Nelson, Commanding Officer, UNAG Mining Vessel Cape Hatteras. Excavating the asteroid has proven easier than projected, and we have reached the ship's cargo limit seven days early. We will use the extra week to explore the rocky portion of the asteroid and collect samples for the scientists back home."
Europa is an unusual moon. On the surface it looks like an ice-skating rink floating in space. You wouldn't think it was one of the most vibrant worlds in the solar system. The surface is just a shell that covers a warm saltwater ocean full of volcanoes and aquatic life.
An enormous hulk of a man with salt-and-pepper hair, a reddish complexion, and a smile the size of Jupiter met us in the reception dome. "Welcome to New San Francisco!" he boomed. "I am the Very Reverend Mirador T. Stunt, Mayor of the sovereign colony of Europa and member of the Council of Colonial Governors—in absentia. Would you like some hot water?"
We nodded, and he started filling closed-top mugs and handing them out. The Europans had the odd habit of drinking plain hot water. They claim it's full of minerals that give it a flavor all its own. They also admit it's an acquired taste. I sipped. It tasted like water with garden soil in it.
"Can you add tea to it?" Stacey asked, seemingly as unimpressed as I was.
"If you want to ruin it! But if you must, we do have a nice blend grown here on Europa," he said as he bounced behind a desk in the tiny reception module. Europa is just a bit smaller than Earth's moon, so you don't walk but bounce. That requires the ceilings there to be rather high.
The Salvagers Page 8