The Salvagers

by John Michael Godier

  "You didn't listen," it said in its detached, almost mechanical tone.

  "What did you do with our people?" I asked aloud, absolutely terrified.

  "They came here in a way that they could not exist."

  "Can you send them back?" I asked.

  "They do not exist."

  "Am I about not to exist?"

  "Yes. Run."

  Wide awake again, I turned as fast as I could and dropped to the floor, running with my hands grabbing anything I could. I had no idea whether I was making any progress. I was no longer even certain that it was all real. Either I was moving entirely on reflex, or whatever it was that had been talking to me was helping me to escape.

  I saw the airlock. Again it was not where it should have been, by my reckoning, but I threw myself into it nonetheless. I hand-cranked the door shut as fast as I could, then started cranking the outer door without bothering with the manual decompress. I looked briefly at the interior window to see the blue light glowing very brightly, flickering and getting more intense, as though it were moving down the corridor. It was following me.

  As soon as the seal broke, I felt myself drawn along with the blast of air. I held onto the hand crank and kept at it as the lock went to vacuum. As soon as it was wide enough for me to slip through, I pushed against the wall with my feet and shot like a torpedo from the ship. My suit regained power without warning. Just as I stabilized my attitude, the Victorious came back into view, and I turned toward it. It was glowing intensely before vanishing in a brief and blinding flash. I was left floating freely in space, desperate to make sense of what had just happened.

  And then, for only a moment, I saw something suspended in space a few hundred feet away. It was a blue ring of light, shrinking and growing dimmer. Inside it was a void that looked almost like normal space but with a faint gray cast and indistinct stars. It gave me the sense that wherever it led was abnormal, somehow very different. It was moving slightly at the last velocity and direction of the former Victorious. It continued until it eclipsed the sun relative to me. As it did so, inside the ring I could see a stark white sun, not yellow as it should have been. It was ill-defined, dimmer, and much larger. And then the ring closed. The vision seemed to melt away into normal sunlight, ending the eclipse.

  Chapter 20 Confusion

  "December 21, 2259. 1700 hours. Log of Captain John Andrew Nelson, Commanding Officer, UNAG Mining Vessel Cape Hatteras. Marquez reports that Galon has found a large chamber at the heart of the cavern system. The walls look to be made of a perfectly smooth and solid mass of the same crystalline mineral found in the samples. I have sent Marquez to accompany him, and they are both now out of contact. I have ordered them to return to the surface and reestablish communications within eight hours."

  Back on the Portsmouth the military men were in an extraordinary state of organized disarray. It was something to see. The chain of command was desperate to maintain the illusion that everything was under control, so they had one half of the crew mired in a hopeless tangle of confusion while the other half dutifully manned their stations. Everyone was collectively trying to convince themselves that the Victorious hadn't just disappeared.

  It was obvious from the chaos that they had no idea of what had happened, or didn't want to believe their eyes. The one thing everyone was avoiding was a cursory glance out the window to confirm that the ship was gone. I couldn't blame them. Not only had they lost an entire crew, but they also had lost an entire ship. And they had no obvious starting point for figuring out why.

  At least someone had the presence of mind to let me back inside the Portsmouth. I was on the verge of banging on the airlock door when a young lieutenant's face appeared in the window and gestured for me to move away so that he could decompress the lock. I repositioned myself to avoid the burst of rushing air and spent a few moments checking my communications. I still was getting nothing, and it wasn't because my suit was defective. I had regained power the instant the ring disappeared. The silence was because no one on the bridge was paying the slightest bit of attention to me.

  I slid myself into the lock, and the lieutenant began the compression cycle by closing the outer door. After a moment I heard the faint sound of rushing air, and I waited for him to give me the thumbs-up. When it came, the young lieutenant opened the inner door. He could see on my face that I wasn't happy about being ignored and abandoned out there.

  "Did you guys forget about me?" I asked.

  "I didn't. From what I hear the bridge is a complete mess. I suppose they forgot about you."

  "Do you know whether Westmoreland is up there? I need to see him immediately."

  "I'm sure he is. I'll take you there when you're ready."

  I took my suit off fast. I wanted to give the Portsmouth’s captain a dressing-down that would have rivaled that of an angry UNAG admiral. The young lieutenant escorted me to the bridge. He didn't have to since I knew how to get there, but I suspected he was looking for an excuse to be near the heart of the action. I understood his desire completely.

  When we entered the bridge, the Captain and Dr. Westmoreland were in heated debate at the command station. I maneuvered over as coyly as I could, hoping not to attract their attention while floating just within earshot. It was one of the juiciest conversations I'd ever heard.

  "The readings indicated negative pressure coming from inside the anomaly," Dr. Westmoreland explained to the Captain.

  "What does that mean? There isn't any kind of pressure in the vacuum of space."

  "There was immediately outside that thing. Pressure is a terrible word for it. Space-time itself was being drawn toward the object. Think of it as like water being pulled in a tide or going down a drain. Anything sitting in the water goes along with it. We were drawn several tens of feet in the direction of the anomaly while it was active, the Cape Hatteras and Hyperion even more because they were closer. It stands to reason that the Victorious was drawn entirely into it."

  "So it's a type of wormhole that sucked the ship in?" the Captain asked.

  "No, I don't think that's a good analogy. A wormhole is a connection between two places in normal space, our kind of space. The medium would be static or equalized, distorted by gravity perhaps but not moving in the fashion that we saw. Whatever we were seeing inside the anomaly was not normal space. It was space with its properties altered."

  "It wasn't part of our universe?"

  "I'm not certain."

  "It seems clear that there was energy there. It was glowing," the Captain remarked, obviously hoping to sound smarter than the scientist.

  "Well, something was emitting photons, but that doesn't mean there was a lot of energy, just some light. High energy always shows a signature. It interacts with things. We didn't detect anything other than some weakly visible light emissions."

  "That's it? All those instruments in the lab, and you only detected light? I could have told you that with my own eyes!"

  "Well, we saw more than that. We could see objects in our space moving toward it. We could detect emissions coming out of it, originating from the matter being drawn in, but that was separate from the anomaly itself. The light the ring itself was emitting was entirely in the visible spectrum and almost entirely blue. There were no other frequencies. I suspect even that was simple Cherenkov radiation emitted by subatomic particles falling into the blackness and exceeding the speed of light in whatever medium surrounded that hole."

  "Exceeding the speed of light is impossible!" the Captain exclaimed. He was getting increasingly frustrated by the scientific mumbo jumbo.

  "In regular space that's correct. The speed of light in space is the fastest anything can go, but that doesn't mean that light can't be slowed down. If you run it through water, or air, it moves more slowly. If you've got some kind of energetic subatomic particle that has enough energy to move faster than light in a medium, say water, then it glows blue like an old nuclear reactor. That's Cherenkov radiation. It may have simply been subatomic particles f
alling into the edges of the ring. We don't know."

  "So this thing was sucking space into it?" I asked. It was the first time they'd noticed me floating near them. Their conversation stopped for a moment before they hesitantly continued, including me in a watered-down version. Or at least that's what they tried to do.

  "Yes. We registered movement on this ship visually, but everything else indicated that we hadn't moved at all. Yet our position, relative to the sun, had changed. The only way that could have happened was by space itself moving. We moved along with it like boats floating in a river's current. Moreover, when the warship disappeared, we saw a flash of emissions, but then they tapered off as the hole closed. We believe those residuals were dust falling into the hole. Based on the radiation readings, I think we were seeing the matter changing state as it entered the other side, wherever that might be."

  "Changing state?"

  "Possibly becoming dark matter, annihilating or losing its cohesiveness in some way. I'm not certain."

  "How do we find out for certain?"

  "I don't know yet. We don't know what kind of space they inhabit. It might be a hyper-form of our space or a lack of space-time altogether. The movement could simply have been the universe itself expanding into the hole. There's no way to tell with our current understanding."

  "They?" I asked. "Those aliens you hinted at. How do you know anything about them? How did you know about what had happened on the Cape Hatteras? You've only given me a few pieces of the puzzle. I demand to know, especially after that thing almost killed me."

  I had grown as frustrated as the Captain. He was clearly anxious at that point, and I could see in his eyes that he was ready to jump at any chance to exclude me. Dr. Westmoreland must have taken my side because he kept offering answers and seemed determined not to let the Captain intrude into the conversation.

  "We know because we were contacted from the other side, Mr. Hunter," said Westmoreland.

  "That's enough," the Captain said, waving his hand in front of Westmoreland.

  "Oh no you don't. I'm in! I already have enough classified information to have coffee with an admiral at headquarters. You can go a bit further, Dr. Westmoreland. Please continue, contacted how?" I asked. The Captain responded by silently crossing his arms.

  "It happened during the Cape Hatteras mission. We're not certain why they were there or whether they had always maintained a presence at the asteroid. Something allowed them to detect us. They appeared to Captain Nelson while his crew was on the surface. He established some kind of contact with them, and then they killed him. We know little else except that they must have left evidence of their presence somewhere on the Cape Hatteras."

  "What evidence?" I asked.

  "We know there is a connection to them on that ship. Something physical. It was probably originally on the asteroid, and the mining crew brought it back. At any rate the logs on the Cape Hatteras will make it clear. You've got them, and we can't stop you from reading them. Our intention was to find whatever it was they left on the ship in the two days we requested, Captain Hunter."

  "How did you come up with two days?" I had to ask.

  "Before your salvage two days was the longest anyone since Captain Nelson had been on that ship without something’s happening. We have instrumentation that we hope will allow us to detect the anomaly before it becomes a problem."

  I didn't mention it, but it had taken less than two days before Sanjay and I started seeing things. I have no doubt that other members of the engineering team saw things as well but kept quiet about it.

  "You son of a bitch! You detected it before I saw it on the Victorious and didn't warn me?"

  "No, no, Captain Hunter. We didn't detect it until the moment the Victorious disappeared. Believe me, you saw it before we did. We saw nothing in the telemetry of your suit before it went dead."

  "In other words you're saying that you can't detect it until it sucks something in?"

  "That appears to be the case. But remember, that only needs to be a few specks of dust."

  "So how do we fight it? It obviously wants to kill us, so what do we do?"

  "Study whatever physical object on that ship allows them to manipulate our space. Assuming, of course, that it can be found. Then we can figure out how to fight them."

  "What do you think it is? I mean, what are we supposed to look for?"

  Even though that was an obvious question to ask, I was injecting it to stake a new claim: I wanted to be on the team looking for whatever it was on the derelict. I wasn't going to let them tear it apart without me. I would have liked to have those scientists on the Hyperion involved as well. I planned to ask for that later.

  "If it's something so simple as an artifact, let’s get to it," I said.

  "It might not be. It could be something so small that we can't see it, something on the level of the subatomic, or it might just as well be a pink box with an X painted on it. We won't know until we go over there and start searching and eliminating possibilities. What I can tell you is to retrieve ANY surface material you find. The logs suggest that Captain Nelson was inordinately interested in some geological samples, but he was a miner, so that may not mean much."

  "Alright," I said, "that's a start, but what exactly do we know about these aliens? You mentioned before that dark matter was involved."

  "Only that they aren't from here and that they're very hostile. We know that dark matter is at work somehow because of an anomaly that was seen by the Cape Hatteras. The asteroid's gravity increased very slightly when the aliens first appeared. It started producing more than its mass should produce. They literally saw Walton's Rock grow heavier."

  "Nothing can do that except by adding more matter," I said.

  "Or by adding dark matter."

  It seemed like a good time to drop a bombshell. "We believe there are missing documents from the initial disaster investigation that we weren't able to access. We know they existed. There are references to another set of documents in what we've got. What are they?"

  Westmoreland glanced at the Captain, deferring to his knowledge on that subject. I lost hope of getting a real answer.

  "We have them, or at least something that might fit the description of what you're talking about. But they're unrevealing, and you'd need security clearance to see them anyway," the Captain said.

  "I think I have clearance enough already."

  "Not that kind of clearance. I haven't even seen them entirely. I doubt that Dr. Westmoreland has read them without some parts redacted."

  "He's right, Cam," said Westmoreland. "I haven't seen much of them, but I can tell you that what I have seen isn't relevant to what we're doing here."

  I was intrigued even more. What was so important in those documents that I couldn't see them? I thought it must be some kind of physical description of the aliens or the content of another message from them. Or maybe it was incriminating evidence of the cover-up.

  "Were the aliens hostile from the beginning?"

  "Yes," the Captain said, cutting off Westmoreland before he could say anything. "They are inherently hostile."

  The Captain took over the conversation from Westmoreland, but as much as he might have liked me to believe that he had more information—information is power—I don't think he did. I believed him when he said that he hadn't seen all of the classified documents, but I couldn't be sure about Westmoreland. He always seemed to be marginally on my side, at least when he was giving me information.

  One thing was clear: it was surprisingly easy to get them to allow me to board the derelict with them. I'm not certain I needed to worry about trying to get myself included. I think they intended to have me along from the beginning. In hindsight I guess it was just more evidence of my expendability. It may even have been worse than that. I am tempted to believe to this day that if I'd had an accident, or been deliberately killed, they would have had a free hand to do as they wished with the Cape Hatteras. I never found out if that was part of their intentions
.

  As we turned to leave the bridge, I noticed that the poor lieutenant had been hovering behind me during the entire conversation and must have been ready to interject some minor detail that he knew from his own clearance level and passed out. Westmoreland and the Captain seemed not to notice him floating there. A moment later two men came onto the bridge with a body bag to collect him. He wasn't unconscious; his implant had killed him.

  Chapter 21 Boarding Party

  "December 22, 2259. 1700 hours. Log of Captain John Andrew Nelson, Commanding Officer, UNAG Mining Vessel Cape Hatteras. It has been 24 hours since I last heard from Galon and Marquez. I have dispatched Hunter and Goreman to the surface to search for them. The ship is experiencing a strange and unexplainable acceleration toward the surface of the asteroid. I have stayed behind to mind the ship and monitor this phenomenon."

  Unlike the case with my exploration of the Victorious, this time I was given a boarding party. I shouldn't say "given": I was just an advisor who knew the terrain. Other than that I was at the bottom of the ladder. My companions were four very gung-ho UNAG marines loaded with every kind of weapon man had yet devised. They had guns that shot old-fashioned bullets and lasers that could zero in on whatever they thought worthy of killing and incinerate it in fraction of a second. They could fire a grenade and blow a building sky high without the blast’s even slightly straying in their direction. All of it was utterly useless against the anomaly. I warned them before we left that their weapons might merely annoy whatever was on the other side, but they maintained that they were following standard procedure and that they would treat the mission like any other.

  I didn't get anywhere by arguing, so that was how the initial team was set up—except that they didn't give me a gun. I can't tell you how much that worried me. I wasn't concerned about fighting the anomaly; I knew that was impossible. I was worried about those marines and their guns when all I had in my hand was a portable welding torch. After seeing that dead lieutenant, my paranoia index had risen considerably. They could choose their moment, shoot me, and call it friendly fire, and I'd have no way to fight back except with the flame from that welder. I therefore intended to watch their every move very carefully.