The Salvagers

by John Michael Godier

  "We aren't going to leave you, Cam," she said.

  "You have to. You don't understand what we're dealing with. If you see that light, it means I'm already dead."

  I could see her temper rising. She was preparing to waylay me with an angry speech about duty and sticking together, but I cut her off before she could launch into it.

  "You've got to. I've seen what this thing can do, Stacey. You’ve heard my order. Now tell me you'll follow it!"

  I was never that forceful with her in all the time that we had worked together. It disarmed her. My eyes flaring and my mind in two worlds at once, I was no longer myself, and she sensed it. Stacey broke down in tears.

  "Aye, Captain. I will follow my orders," she said quietly.

  I believed her but felt badly. It is not in my nature to be authoritarian, especially to someone who was like a daughter to me.

  She also had done me a very great favor. She had had the presence of mind when evacuating the Cape Hatteras to override the outer airlock door and leave it open to space. Spending those few moments doing that could have gotten her killed, but there would be no one onboard to let us back in if she hadn't. I then would have had to cut into the hull a third time.

  I silently turned and moved down the hall, leaving the bridge to her.

  "Hey," I said to Neil while getting ready to climb into the airlock. He knew by my tone that I was going to say something personal.

  "Yeah? Don't get mushy. You've been in so much danger lately that I'm numb to it. You'll be fine." he said.

  "Now you know how I feel every time you do one of your insane space walks."

  "Yeah, but I know what I'm doing. You just wing it and play around with UNAG spies."

  "You're right that I'll be fine, but I want you to hold onto something for me just in case," I said, giving him the gold charm. "Your mother gave me that when she visited me on Titan. It's the Cape Hatteras."

  "I know. I cast it. You should keep it."

  "Oh, I want it back alright. Your mother said it was from the Hyperion's crew, but I think it was really her idea. Of course, she'll never admit it. If I don't come back, it's the last link between you, me, and your mother."

  "And the Cape Hatteras," Neil said.

  "You should hold onto it just in case."

  He took the charm and worked hard to suppress his tears until one rolled down his cheek. It was only the second time I'd ever seen that since he was out of diapers. The other occasion was that when Janet and I told him we were divorcing. He was still in his early teens when things finally self-destructed, and he hadn't taken it well. Janet and I could both tell that he wanted us to be a happy, functional family, exploring space together instead of being separated and angry.

  "That pendant represents my greatest moment," I continued, "and your first big one, but I'll bet money that it won't be your greatest. You're going to go on and do bigger things than I ever did. I know it. The adventure is just starting for you."

  "Of course I'll be great," Neil said, "but watch yourself. Remember, if you die, I get to be the captain. Kurt and I then can ditch Cranky and pick up a group of Mars babes. Party Ship is a better name than Amaranth Sun."

  "It'll be a few more years before that happens. Keep those engines hot, son. I'll be back," I said as I ruffled his hair.

  "I will, Dad. I'm holding you to that," he said, closing the airlock door as I snapped on my helmet. It's easy to prepare other people for your impending death, but it’s another matter entirely to prepare yourself. I tried not to think about it.

  When the outer airlock door opened, I pushed myself off lightly into space. I remembered a time when that was frightening, something you did very carefully and cautiously, but for me it had become almost routine. A year earlier I considered space-walking the most dangerous part of salvage work. People at home always asked how we dealt with the stress of the constant danger. I'd never known quite how to answer, but now I would have told them that you deal with it like all of life’s dangers: you just do what you have to do.

  It took nearly twenty minutes to close the distance. I occupied myself by staring at the derelict. You never get to see something quite the same as the first time you set eyes on it. After then it becomes a known and familiar thing. But the Cape Hatteras was once again different. The known had morphed into the unknown, terra incognita once more.

  I gently checked my momentum against the starboard side of the Cape Hatteras and hoisted myself into the open airlock. Its automated system sensed that I was inside and closed the door gently, the silence of space giving way to the sound of flowing air until a sign indicated safety.

  After the interior door opened, I took off my helmet. In hindsight I probably should have done the usual tests to verify the atmosphere, but I somehow knew it would be fine. Perhaps I was growing careless or numb to what I regarded as minor dangers. Once on that ship I didn't fear anything. My emotions were strangely and unnaturally disengaged. I wondered idly whether that was the effect of the crystals or of too much reliance on the familiarity I now had with that ship. I couldn't tell.

  I made my way to the hold. The entire room was coated in black crystal. They'd grown from floor to ceiling, giving the room the look of a cave. The bulkheads were a perfectly smooth wall of solid gemstone shimmering in the ship's lights, themselves shining dark violet through the crystal that covered them. It had inched itself past the hold doors and was just beginning to spread along the walls of the corridors, first in lightning-like streaks and then filling in as they grew.

  I could perceive the growth indirectly. Over a few minutes I could discern a change. They were encasing the Cape Hatteras, entombing it in dark-matter minerals, but something had changed. I could now touch the crystals and experience no reaction. I ran my fingers along their smooth surfaces without the slightest hint of blue radiation.

  I wondered whether the Dark Matter Beings had control of them now and whether the former threat had passed. I took a few photographs and left within the hour, satisfied that the Cape Hatteras was safe for the time being. I returned to the Amaranth Sun, taking care to the leave the outer airlock door open to space as Stacey had done.

  "Open a channel to the Hyperion," I said to Stacey the moment I shot into the bridge.

  "Captain Janet." I figured she'd hate me calling her that. "The derelict appears to be safe, or something close to it. Even so I think it would be best if you transferred any non-essential personnel and the prisoners to the Titan colony until we get a grip on what's going on here. No need to endanger everyone if we don't have to, and the historians and engineers won't be needed for a while."

  I took a certain pleasure in the idea of abandoning Keating and his mutineers in a jail on Titan. It was a just research station, not a full colony. It didn't have a large jail with private cells but just one locked room. It might easily be a year before extradition to Earth could be arranged.

  "You have such a way of instilling confidence in the safety of a mission," Janet replied sarcastically. "I can run this ship myself, at least for a while. I'll rendezvous with you in two days."

  Chapter 28 Day 328

  "December 25, 2259. 2300 hours. Log of Captain John Andrew Nelson, Commanding Officer, UNAG Mining Ship Cape Hatteras. Salus is dead. They have killed him from within me. I am an echo of John Nelson, now a marionette whose strings are being pulled from across the threshold of the two universes. Death gives me the gift of clarity. I see the signpost for what it truly is. It reveals the well, and it is Jupiter. I am to destroy the ship in the planet's atmosphere."

  It must have been an effect of visiting the Crystal Palace—a nice new name for the derelict, I thought. I had developed a throbbing four-alarm headache that began the moment I left the Cape Hatteras, and it would not go away no matter what I tried. I went through the Amaranth Sun's medicine cabinet and tried every pill and stimulator we had. Nothing worked. I finally resorted to the EES, the strongest piece of medical equipment a ship like mine carried. It was for shutting d
own the pain centers of the brain in those who were very seriously injured. It could block the agony of the severest of burns but leave you nearly catatonic until it was shut off. Even it could not block that damned headache.

  The two days before Janet arrived left me with plenty of time to focus on the pain. I spent most of it in my zip-bunk, keeping the room as dark as I could make it. That helped a little, enough to let me clear my head and record a quantum-pad report for her. I wanted to tell her everything I knew about the crystals.

  Recording seemed to lessen the pain, or at least distract me from it, so I made the report long and detailed. I told her almost everything, from the submarine episode at Europa to every word Westmoreland had said to me. Considering what might be in store for us, I felt that she deserved to have every piece of hard information I could give her. The only thing I left out was my uncertainty about communications from the dark-matter universe. I had laid the faltering and uncertainty aside. It was a message, not a dream. I was convinced that I was doing the right thing, but there was no way I could sell it to her without hard evidence, and I couldn't afford to have her questioning me about it, so I continued to insist that it was an unambiguous message.

  There was just one thing left that had be reckoned with: saving the Cape Hatteras. The easy way to accomplish the mission would be to destroy the ship, but then I'd need a way to justify that to Ed Iron. I probably was making too much of what Ed's reaction would be. He might not get the Cape Hatteras, but the gold on the Hyperion would still yield an enormous profit. I think he would have taken it as a disappointment rather than a catastrophe. The real problem was me. Destroying the Cape Hatteras was as unthinkable as burning the Mona Lisa would be to an art historian. I had to save it, or at least try. I wasn't certain that I could pull the trigger if it had to be destroyed.

  I was still in the zip-bunk when a way to save the ship came to me amid the throbbing pain. I considered it a stroke of genius. While the crystals were growing in the presence of gravity, getting them away from any gravity source should stop the growth. Westmoreland had been right about that, I thought. But what would happen if they were kept away from gravity for a long period of time? They might shrink, I theorized. Nelson's crystals were relatively small when I found them in his cabin. It seemed logical that they must have been larger when he was being affected by them, but that shrinkage might also have taken centuries.

  Even if they didn't shrink in a timely manner, it didn't seem too difficult a thing to do: just head into deep space and steer clear of the planets. The crystals were soft. That meant they could be removed. We could chip them off the derelict, load them into suitable unmanned pods, and shoot them at Saturn one by one until the ship was clean. The only harm done would be the delay in getting the ship home to Earth for display and the pitted surfaces where the crystals had been growing.

  But there was an unfortunate wild card in that idea: the unpredictability of it all. There was no guarantee that those crystals wouldn't flash to life without warning and conjure up the anomaly. I'd already been wrong about that once, and I could have easily been wrong again. I didn't want to lose any more lives over the Cape Hatteras—it had taken far too many already—so the first step of my plan would be to suggest to Janet that we reposition the derelict away from Saturn in open space. We would then have the Amaranth Sun cool its heels at a safe distance, but still within sight, until Ed Iron could get a specialized crew out there to deal with the crystals. In the meantime we would return the Hyperion to Earth with the gold and all non-essential personnel.

  As it turned out, Janet wasn't very receptive to the plan after reading my report. I thought I'd done a good job of downplaying the danger of the crystals, but she had the annoying habit of assuming that anything I said was five times more hazardous than I made it out to be, especially if her son was involved and would be watching the derelict from the Amaranth Sun.

  "Cam, that ship is dangerous. You've been dealing with those crystals for some time, and based on that insulting report you sent the only thing you can count on is their being highly unpredictable. You should have told me all of this shit when it was happening, instead of acting like a spy and keeping secrets with the goddamned UNAG."

  "I'm sorry, but I had to if everything was going to. . . . "

  "We've got to get rid of it. You said yourself in your report that a small block of crystal in the corner of a laboratory on Titan was enough to create the anomaly. Well, now you've got several metric tons of crystal sitting on the Cape Hatteras."

  Janet was still several hundred thousand kilometers out, so I had a few hours to try to convince her. I needed every minute of it.

  "I'm surprised. I thought you'd want to preserve this thing for Ed Iron."

  "Ed will understand! Cam, that ship kills people! You can't let the public tour it when you don't understand what you're dealing with. It will have to be investigated for years, maybe decades, and it will probably cost him too much to make the thing safe anyway. He'll see it as a lost cause and hand it over to the UNAG. He'll be happy with the gold."

  "I don't think. . . ."

  "I think you do. I think you know it quite well. You just don't want to give up Cam Hunter's ten minutes of fame. You want to show it off to everyone so that they can see how magnificent you are."

  I knew she was right. Still, I wasn't ready to give up. Something would not allow me to. God, how my head pounded with every word she said.

  "Janet, I don't think I can do it. You're right, the ship is important to me. I looked for it for so long. I dreamed about it since I was a kid. I don't want to destroy it."

  "Cam, how do you feel?" she asked.

  "I have a terrific headache, but that's irrelevant. I'd be saying this if I felt like a million tons of gold."

  "Are you sure? You were in close proximity to those crystals again. They affected you on Titan, as you admitted in your report. They allowed the aliens to speak to you. How do you know they're not doing something to you now?"

  "I don't. I really don't know what's happening. But remember, the Dark Matter Beings want me to destroy the crystals and close the bridge permanently. They don't want to keep them around and make jewelry out of them. But they have nothing to do with the ship itself. We are doing the right thing. We can destroy them and save the ship. I know it."

  I hoped that I'd convinced her that I wasn't crystal-crazy. She was reluctant, and it took two more hours of debate before she finally agreed to try my plan. I had the Amaranth Sun catch up to her, leaving the derelict alone. Protecting my crew was more important than protecting the Cape Hatteras, and there was still the warship watching everything that went on below from its God's-eye view high above Saturn.

  I transferred to the Hyperion and ordered the Amaranth Sun into a similar orbit to that of the Portsmouth. I hoped that maneuver would keep everyone but Janet and me out of harm's way. The two of us were all that were essential, or so I hoped, and I still thought I could save the day and satisfy everyone, including the Dark Matter Beings. My mind changed when we attempted to approach the Cape Hatteras.

  "Ten kilometers out, Cam, and closing," Janet said.

  "Preparing to enter a trajectory that will bring us alongside the derelict," I said from the navigation station.

  Our plan was to stop and leave a space of about two hundred feet between the ships. That would allow Janet to cross over to the Cape Hatteras and cold-start the engines so that we could set a course for deep space. It was going well until the distance closed to five kilometers.

  "Cam!" Janet exclaimed. I had been gazing at my instrument panel blankly. I looked up and felt my heart skip a beat. The Cape Hatteras had lost power. The lights were out. The ship was dark again, just as I had found it near that burned-out comet over a year ago.

  "I just left this thing. It hasn't been two hours. What could have happened?" I asked.

  "Don't worry. It could be nothing. Those are 200-year-old reactors on that ship. We may have got them running again, but that
doesn't mean they can't break down, especially if they're left unattended for days. I'll have a look at them when I go over."

  "I'm going with you. It could be something else."

  "I doubt the anomaly wanted to save electricity and went around turning the lights off," replied Janet.

  "It shut my suit down when I was on the Victorious."

  "It doesn't matter. You're not an engineer, and someone has to stay and man the Hyperion. It's supposed to run on a crew of five at all times. It won't run long on zero manpower," she said.

  "I'll go over. You can talk me through it," I replied as I began to move toward the door. She gave a look that made me realize how ridiculous I was being. A cold start was a very complicated procedure that was usually performed only at space stations. Most ships spend their lives at least at idle, their engines are turned on when they are launched and only shut off again when they are scrapped.

  "Then I won't get to see that crystal cave of yours," she said.

  She was right, as usual, and my head hurt so badly at that point that I was starting to wonder whether I could operate the Hyperion's navigation station, much less cold-start the Cape Hatteras's engines. And the pain was getting worse. It had to be my proximity to the crystals. The closer we got to the Cape Hatteras, the more I wanted to lie down and sleep.

  Somewhere around the time we reached the 300-meter mark, I lost all memory. I have no recollection of Janet’s suiting up and heading for the lock, and I remember nothing about her crossing over. I should remember, but I don't. She never mentioned that I was acting strangely, or any worse than I already was, so I assume that I was conscious the whole time and doing my job. I don't remember a thing until I heard her voice on the comm telling me that she was onboard the derelict.

  "In the airlock and compressing," she said.

  "Be careful over there."