The Salvagers

by John Michael Godier

  I felt that the figure could not comprehend me entirely but was linked to me in some other way. Intimate and cerebral, I could feel his presence much more precisely than I could see him. He held out his hand, upward and palm forward in greeting, projecting to my mind a sense that I was seeing a version of myself. It was me, in a way, but it was a different form of me, a dark-matter equivalent that occupied the same place in his universe that I did in mine. He was trying to speak but couldn't. He neither understood language, or even the concept of it, but even more he did not understand air and sound itself.

  I didn't know where I was. It could have been the other side of the anomaly, where they might have taken me. Or could I have been dreaming, lucid but only semi-conscious? Even a dream seems rational when one is immersed in it, but you always wake to a different truth and find that it was only a dream.

  The place grew darker, the only light coming from the kaleidoscope man. It faded as he seemed to give up. The next instant I was on the bridge of the Cape Hatteras, staring through its windows at a gray and unnatural space with a white sun burning dim and indistinct.

  "Captain Hunter," I heard behind me.

  "Who's there?" I said, turning around but seeing nothing.

  "Captain Hunter," again the voice said, this time with frustration telescoping through to my subconscious but still providing me with no direction in which to look for the voice’s source. On that bridge he could not be seen. It was he that could not exist in my universe.

  When the image changed again, I found myself in the laboratory on Titan staring into a ring blazing with furious blue fire. I was barely inches from it, bending forward to see inside without the fear that would have stricken me when fully awake.

  "Are you trying to speak to me?" I asked it.

  "The difference is too great," the voice said. I thought it was in my head, as before, but I realized it wasn't. It was my own mouth speaking the words.

  "The time of the bridge is coming," it said through me.

  "The bridge? You mean the anomaly?" I responded to myself.

  "It must go into the well," it said.

  "What is the well? You must be clearer."

  And with that my mind's eye flashed Saturn. But it was different too, unrecognizable were it not for the planet’s rings. Very much like the white sun, it was nearly formless and encircled with rings of mist instead of ice and rock.

  "Gravity," the voice said through me.

  "Gravity well. You want me to throw the anomaly into Saturn," I responded with the elation that comes with sudden and unexpected understanding.

  "The bridge will close," it said.

  "You want me to close the gateway? You are the ones that opened it. You have control."

  "No," the voice said.

  "Why do you make the crystals grow? Why don't you stop them?"

  "There are others, the enemies of us all."

  I awoke startled and gasping for air, the ruddy orange of Titan pouring into my eyes once more. My oxygen was low, and my suit read carbon dioxide levels near to the point of forcing unconsciousness. But that is not sleep; it is the black void of an oxygen-starved brain. If I had passed out, I would not have been dreaming.

  My body felt as though it was made of lead, even in the weak gravity of that world. I reached back to the oxygen flow valve on the rear of my suit and opened it fully, hoping to give myself enough of a blast of residual air to give me strength enough to make it to the emergency bottle stored in the skimmerloon.

  I asked myself whether the episode had been real as I fumbled through the broken cockpit and found the bottle, securing it to my suit and breaking its seal. I watched my oxygen levels return to normal. It had to have been an authentic message.

  Dreams are not a credible basis on which to form an operational plan, certainly not one that I could sell to Janet. But if the voice was a communication, a kind of tuning of my consciousness to them, then it was legitimate. It was something I could trust, which I desperately needed given that Westmoreland was dead. My task seemed unambiguous: I was to drop the crystal I had taken from the table into Saturn. But treading the line of knowing what to do without admitting the questionable basis for it was a challenge. To my crew I would say that it was a direct communication while I was fully conscious. I would never tell anyone that it was really something far less certain.

  I stood up and brushed off the ice dust and hydrocarbon sludge. I was very cold, even with the superinsulation and heating provided by the suit. It was not a long-exposure suit, and I had exceeded the temperature threshold for which it had been designed. In short, I was beginning to freeze to death. The frostbite burned my face and chest, and my head ached awfully. Any sudden movement made the pain unbearable. I could see the crystal on the ground, or more accurately where it had been. It had melted itself several inches into the ice, its presence suggested only by the streaks of blue light radiating from the hole.

  I didn't want direct contact with the crystal. It was affecting me, I thought, and the closer it was, the worse the effects would be. I pulled out one of the balloon's lines from the compartment and cut it, then tied the crystal securely, pulling it along twenty feet behind me as I staggered across the desolate Plain of Dilmun, paradoxically named after the Sumerian garden of paradise. It was no such thing, however. It was a muddy and flat marshland awash with gasoline's chemical cousins that led to a mostly dry ocean bed occasionally filled by downpours every few centuries.

  I had no way of knowing precisely where I was. I knew that I was somewhere near the yellow dot I had seen on the navigation map in the skimmerloon, but as I looked around I couldn't see a settlement. The plain seemed to stretch endlessly in every direction, but I could see only a few hundred feet ahead before the orange smog swallowed the horizon. I explored for hours, mindful of the sinking needle on my suit’s oxygen meter. I was terrified and expected that I would die out there. But a stiff and welcome wind cleared the smog just enough for me to discern the domes of a settlement just over half a mile away.

  I reached the colony just after midnight by my calculations. I hadn't even seen it when it materialized, lost as I was in contemplating imminent death. Encountering a plastic wall, I couldn't tell whether it was a boulder or a structure. I just knew that I was annoyed that it was in my way. I looked up and saw the hulking mass of an atmospheric dome. Realizing what it was, I slammed my fists against it until I couldn't anymore. I fell to my knees, staring face-up at a hazy and barely visible Saturn. Soon men with lights shone them in my face, blinding me. The brightness persisted in my eyes as they dragged me inside along with my crystal. I awoke two days later in their medical facility, feeling substantially better.

  "God damn it, Cam!" my ex-wife said, looking down at me as I struggled to open my eyes. "I've been planning your funeral for hours, and here you are improving."

  "Hello, honey," I said.

  "You wouldn't believe how surprised the researchers were when a strange man wandered up and started banging on the Propulsion Institute's dome."

  "What happened?" I asked. "I remember seeing men, but that's all. I'm drawing a blank after that."

  "The first thing they did," said Janet, "was to post a guard here and do an orbital search to see whether there were any mafia ships marooning you for pissing off a Triton boss. They found something alright: our fleet. I got down here as soon as they contacted us and told us that they had Camden Hunter in their hospital."

  "How did they know it was me?"

  "That gold pendant around your neck has your name on it."

  I sat up in bed, hurting awfully, but overall I felt alright, in fact better than I had while lying by the crashed skimmerloon. Thinking of it reminded me of the crystal.

  "Where is the crystal I was dragging? It's important."

  "It's on the transport. I'm surprised you were able to drag that thing that far."

  "It's not that big," I said.

  "Yes, it is. It must weigh over fifty pounds," Janet responded.

/>   It was growing, I thought. I figured it was best not to tell her about that aspect of things until later. "I'm ready to go," I said, as I started to climb out of bed.

  "Not until you're well enough for the trip. You've got frostbite, and the physician says your brainwave profile is abnormal. You need more rest."

  "I can rest on the Amaranth Sun better than I can here."

  "Always the idiot," she said.

  The doctor on duty wasn't pleased that I was leaving. He claimed that my brainwaves were like nothing he'd ever seen before and that I should stay for observation. He looked as though he wanted to sedate me, but I told him that I was going to leave no matter what he said. Eventually he acquiesced and gave me some medicinal salves and a stimulant injection to get me back to the ship. It helped. I felt wonderful for about half an hour. But the moment I sat down in the transport, I fell into another long, deep sleep.

  I awoke alone, zipped up tightly in my bunk bag on the Amaranth Sun. I felt pretty good, I thought, as I pulled myself out. Zero gravity is very therapeutic during illness, like floating on a cloud, though it can make nausea and dizziness that much worse. I opened the door and floated into the hall, looking both ways toward the bridge and then the engineering section. I didn't see anyone.

  "Hello?" I said, not getting an answer. I repeated myself a bit louder. "Hello!". . . Still nothing. I pulled myself sluggishly along a wall to the bridge. There was no one there. There should always be someone on the bridge, I thought, though in truth we often left it unattended when nothing was going on. I panicked. If the crew wasn't there, they might have been taken by the anomaly.

  "Hello!" I yelled again at the top of my lungs.

  "Yeah, what? Jesus, Dad, what are you screaming about?" Neal said as he popped his head out of engineering. I was quite relieved.

  "Where the hell is everyone?" I asked.

  "Kurt and Cranky are onboard the Cape Hatteras. That crystal thing you brought back is getting bigger, so they dumped it over there," he said.

  "I know. We've got to drop it into Saturn and get rid of it."

  "I think they wanted to get rid of it anyway. It's filling up the hold over there already. How the hell can a rock grow like that?"

  "I need to warn them," I said, as I pulled myself to the communications station. "Cape Hatteras, this is Cam. Get that crystal off the ship!"

  "Cam!" Stacey responded. “It's wonderful to hear your voice! We were worried about you.”

  "No time for chat, Stacey. That thing could hit critical mass at any moment and open the anomaly!"

  "There's no way to get it out of here now. It's too big."

  "Evacuate! You are in terrible danger!" I yelled.

  The minutes counted down. I sat on the bridge of the Amaranth Sun in frantic and helpless suspense until finally I saw Stacey and Kurt emerge from the airlock and fire the jets on their suits to cross the gap. As soon as they were in the Sun's lock, I plotted a course to bring us to a position several hundred kilometers ahead of the Cape Hatteras. I hoped that it would be close enough to monitor the derelict but far enough away to avoid the anomaly. The Hyperion had been following a higher, slower orbit and had drifted to the other side of Titan relative to us. I tried to contact those still there, but the effort was futile. It would be hours before they were in range.

  I thought about the irony of it all. A few months ago I wanted to be as close to my salvage prize as I could get, and now I wanted to be far away. I didn't think Westmoreland had been right: the crystals reacted to me for some reason, but they didn't need me around to form the ring. It formed on its own and had taken two people on the Cape Hatteras while I was 20 million miles away on Europa. There was something else in play, another aspect of the mechanism. I desperately needed to figure out what it was. I made my way to the airlock to let my crewmen in.

  "Why are we moving? What the hell is going on?" Stacey asked the moment the airlock door opened.

  "Those crystals could form the anomaly at any time. They destroyed the research station and killed Westmoreland and his scientists," I said.

  "The crystals are growing, but I didn't see any sign of immediate danger. Why the urgency?"

  "I'm not at my best," I said. "At any rate, we should be alright when we get a good distance away."

  I felt relieved that everyone was safe. When my thoughts returned to the message from the Dark Matter Beings, a terrible realization hit me. To destroy the crystals now would destroy the Cape Hatteras. Ed Iron wouldn't get his museum piece. We would have to try get them off the ship somehow, and every moment that passed meant that the task would be harder.

  Chapter 27 Day 327

  "December 25, 2259. 1900 hours. Log of Captain John Andrew Nelson, Commanding Officer, UNAG Mining Ship Cape Hatteras. I am passing a dead trojan comet. The voices call it the signpost. I am nearly out of fuel, but they assure me that we will reach our destination. Even when they do not speak through me, I know they are always here. They guide my actions with a reassuring hand. They are me, and I am them. It has always been this way, but it is only now that I am made aware of it. The signpost leads to the well, and I am to take my ship into it so that the forces of our enemies can be silenced forever."

  I didn't understand it. Not that I expected anything in that mission to add up to something sensible, but at least the powers that be—whatever those were—could have given me the satisfaction of some tiny measure of predictability. I would have been grateful for anything consistent with what I'd already been through that would have helped me get by without second-guessing myself every damned day. But that's not what I was given.

  We had watched the Cape Hatteras for nearly a week through the telescopes on the Amaranth Sun. We spent hours in shifts gawking at that derelict trying to detect the slightest change in its appearance—blue light in the windows, any unusual movement—that might have signaled the crystals’ reaching their critical mass and conjuring up the anomaly. Unfortunately, I didn't know what we would have done if we had seen something. I was putting enormous trust in the only thing I had: the Dark Matter Beings. If my understanding of them was correct, they didn't open the anomaly, but once it was there they had some kind of limited control over what it could do. I hoped they had enough influence to make certain that it didn't eat us if we flew nearby to attach a tow line.

  After a week of round-the-clock surveillance, everyone's patience had badly eroded. We engaged in seemingly endless debates over whether or not one of us had seen something. At first they were simple discussions. If someone had noticed a flash, we'd all look through the telescope and study the instrument readings. Then we would disagree and invariably blame it on an errant cosmic ray skittering across the spotter's retina. But things got worse. My crew annoyed with the false alarms. Tempers flared, and one by one each of us acknowledged the emerging truth: nothing was happening on that ship. Only I held out.

  They therefore started directing their anger toward me. At first they tried to hide it, and then came occasional small outbursts. But by the end of that week they were openly furious for my keeping us idle and stationary, on edge but doing nothing. Stacey was the first to succumb. She was also the loudest in trying to persuade me to do something. Impatience was in her nature, and the more frustrated she got the harder it was to live with her.

  Safe as the Cape Hatteras may have appeared, there was still no way I could bring myself to put any trust in those crystals. I took every precaution I could think of. I instructed the Hyperion to remain in a diametric orbit opposite the derelict while warning my ex-wife of imminent catastrophe. I had been telling the Portsmouth to stay even further away in a high orbit of Saturn on the orders of Westmoreland before he died, which I'd made up hoping they'd buy into the ruse and comply.

  I was still convinced that the Cape Hatteras was eventually going to blow just as soon as those crystals reached critical mass. The captain of the Portsmouth was the only one who seemed remotely persuaded that I was right. He was a cautious sort, so he kept his
distance, dutifully following the false orders of a dead man.

  I was worried about that lie. Westmoreland had said no such thing. I had to be vague yet scientific in sounding like a man with far more education than I really possessed. I knew that if I said anything that the Portsmouth's captain found questionable, his crew would have taken over the entire affair and thrown me into his ship’s brig. But the risk was worth it. I needed them far enough away but not too far. It would take them a few hours to get where the Amaranth Sun was if we needed them, but not so close as to be able to meddle.

  I certainly couldn't tell the military that the Cape Hatteras had to be destroyed. They wanted to study the anomaly, not destroy it, but I worried that I was weaving a web with the UNAG that would get increasingly difficult to maintain. All I knew was that I needed to be in control of the operation at all costs.

  At the same time I knew that it was only a matter of time before the military would see through my deception and the admiralty would override Westmoreland's orders. I convinced myself that I could no longer afford to be inactive. I needed to move the plan forward, and do it quickly before the military took the initiative. On the eighth day I conceded that the crystals had to be past critical mass and the danger averted. That wasn't an easy decision to reach.

  My first step was to move the Amaranth Sun closer to the Cape Hatteras. I didn't want to risk the lives of my crew, so I intended to go over myself and see what was happening aboard the derelict.

  "It's about time," Stacey said.

  "I haven't changed my beliefs, Stacey. Those crystals are extremely dangerous. But we can't sit here forever, so I'm going over to see what's happening."

  "You'll need help. I'll suit up and go with you."

  "No, Stacey. I need you to stay here. There's no sense in risking anyone else. I can simply take a look around and return. If you see any blue light coming out of that ship’s windows, I want you to punch the Amaranth Sun's engines and get the hell out of here."