The Salvagers

by John Michael Godier

  "Stop worrying. You were here alone just a few days ago playing around and coming up with new pet names for the Cape Hatteras. Interior door opening. Stepping through. My God!"

  "What?"

  "Cam, they're active! There's blue light everywhere in the corridor!"

  I tried to tell her to get out of there, but she couldn't hear me. My mouth moved, but I had no breath to force the words out.

  Chapter 29 Day 330

  "December 25, 2259. 23:30 hours. Final log entry of Captain John Andrew Nelson, Commanding Officer, UNAG Mining Ship Cape Hatteras. The ship no longer responds to my command. Against my will it has entered into a distant orbit of the signpost and vented its remaining fuel. I cannot get to Jupiter.

  "The voices have fallen silent. I have been abandoned. The man I was is already gone, and I can feel what I have become slipping away with each passing moment. I see it blazing in my mind's eye, depriving me of a peaceful passing. Blue light announces the bridge between the worlds, made to exist by the most terrible of enemies, but they did not have a command of normal matter to accomplish it alone. They used the uniqueness of the golden asteroid to set a trap. All that was needed was human greed to spring it. Once taken to Earth and in the prolonged presence of its gravity, they would unite matter and dark matter as one to enslave us not in body but in mind, time, and matter. I am powerless to stop them. They are coming for me. They intend to exact their vengeance."

  "Cam, I've got power back, but if we're going to get this ship to Saturn and destroy it, I'll need to get those engines running and then plot a course," Janet said.

  I couldn't say a word.

  "I don't think we'll have any problems. The UNAG team cleaned the exhaust bells and did most of the cold-start prep. But I won't be able to leave the engine room. I will have to keep the crystals from overtaking the main reactor. I'll use a hammer if I have to."

  I was still forced to remain silent.

  "If we lose the engines, the ship won't be able to rotate and perform a deorbit burn. It could end up skipping into a semi-stable Saturn orbit. It might take years for it to decay and finally fall. The UNAG will have retrieved it before then."

  I desperately tried to say something to her. I wanted her off that ship, and I wanted it left where it was until we could figure out a way to save it. I was physically prevented from speaking and mute from the intense pain. I tried with all my strength to form a word. Any utterance would have been a triumph. I tried to get up from my station and in the process flailed in zero-G, smacking into a pile of quantum pads that scattered around the bridge. The effort exhausted me; I could muster nothing else. I was left floating motionless. I heard her switch off her communications link.

  My struggles probably wouldn't have mattered. If I had been able to say something, Janet in all likelihood would have ignored me. She knew that I had become unreliable and badly compromised. "God damn her," I remember thinking. I thought about leaving the Hyperion on automatic navigation, jamming the ship's airlock open, and dragging her back if necessary. The truth was that I couldn't have moved ten feet, much less hundreds.

  But those sentiments were a play on my emotions at the direction of someone else. It wasn't about her; it was really about the ship, or what was in it. I understood then that my compulsion wasn't a simple desire to save the salvage of my dreams. A feeling had been growing for some time deep within me. I don't know when it started or where it came from, but it introduced a terrible contradiction. Something was telling me that I had to rescue the crystals.

  It now seemed that the crystals themselves were important, more so than anything else in the universe. I felt directed to use whatever excuse I could to save them, like an addict hiding his problem. It was madness, and I was ashamed of having thought it. In those few seconds Janet herself seemed secondary to the derelict. Everything else bordered on the meaningless. I could feel my natural human priorities giving way to indifference. In my mind there were now only the crystals.

  I was held in check by the Dark Matter Beings. I couldn't have moved from that bridge on my own. They would not let me be influenced by their enemy. I paid for those horrible thoughts with a loss of consciousness. While asleep, I was under their control. It seemed like only a few minutes when Janet turned her communications back on and said something that I couldn't immediately understand. In fact, she had been working for hours.

  "The crystals have destroyed one of the peripheral reactors," she said, "and they're spreading through the engineering compartment. I lost power to the navigation control, but I've bypassed the damaged reactor, and it's working again. The main reactor should give us enough power to start and operate the engines."

  I tried once more to spit out words telling her to escape. I felt a little stronger at that point, and I might have been able eventually to get it out, but she cut me off before I could.

  "I'm going to have to stay on this ship if it's going to make it to Saturn. I'm sending you the course solutions. You need to input them into the navigation menus. The Hyperion will follow the Cape Hatteras and eventually overtake it. When you reach a distance of 100 meters ahead, it will be at the exact time when we can be certain that this thing is going to burn up cleanly. I will come over then. You'll need to drop a tow line to me. Remember that, Cam. Be ready for me when you overtake the Cape Hatteras. We will have very little time to spare."

  I managed some sort of response, but she didn't understand it. I knew what I wanted to say: I still wanted to save the derelict. My words were incomprehensible, however. I was nearly screaming them in frustration, but it seemed that the harder I tried, the less sense they made. The power the Dark Matter Beings had over me was absolute. They could not allow me to be influenced by another power; they could not permit me to give in to them and save the Cape Hatteras. They were causing the pain to occupy me while they controlled my body to do their bidding. I was like a mouse being shocked in a maze: I either did as they wished, or I was punished while they forced me do it anyway. I began to react by wanting to fight them, only to be pushed back by waves of intense pain and brief periods of unconsciousness.

  Other alien thoughts flashed through my mind. It wasn't a voice or anything so obvious. I felt that my ex-wife and the Dark Matter Beings were against me but that the darkness was not. Like a puppet with too many people pulling the strings, I could not function to resist any of them. I simply had to endure them.

  In my altered state of consciousness, I could no longer tell which side was right. I tried to refocus. I looked at the orbital solutions Janet had sent. They were unambiguous: the Cape Hatteras would be destroyed if I typed them into the computer. It wasn't what I wanted, and given any chance I would have stopped it. That horrible schizophrenia had gone on long enough. The confusion and pain had driven things to be about more than just the derelict and the crystals. It was also a battle for control of my own self-determination given the two powers at war in my body.

  I must have lapsed into unconsciousness again, though it was now hard to recognize the line between being awake and being asleep. It couldn't have been for long. I found myself standing in front of the kaleidoscope man again. He gestured that I should grasp his hand. I did but sensed no physical presence. He was not solid. I felt his sorrow for putting me through such pain, and it comforted me. He knew that I couldn't take anymore. He knew that I wanted to feel normal and that I would have done anything to make it all stop. At that moment I awoke again to barely tolerable pain, but it was far less intense than before. I knew that any second thoughts would bring back the agony, so I ordered the ship to execute Janet's calculations. I had given in to the Dark Matter Beings.

  "Cam, have you entered the orbital solution into the Hyperion’s navigation computer?" Janet asked. I heard her but didn't respond.

  "Cam!" she yelled.

  "Yes," I said. It was the first clear word that I had been able to form in hours, but it was different now. It was my word.

  The solution was straightforward. If Janet coul
d maintain the reactors, the Cape Hatteras would maneuver itself into a high angle of descent toward Saturn, and at the proper moment it would rotate 180 degrees and fire its engines at full thrust in a backwards attitude. That would slow the ship until it no longer had enough momentum to maintain an orbit. It would plummet and incinerate cleanly in the planet’s atmosphere.

  "The Hyperion is flying the course you wanted," I said haltingly, not unlike how the aliens had spoken to me. In my mind I implored the Dark Matter Beings to let me talk to my ex-wife without interference. I admitted to them as loudly as I could think that I had lost the war and that I would pay no attention to any impulse contradictory to my mission. Suddenly I felt the remaining restrictions on my speech lift like a physical fog that had been enveloping my body.

  "I will overtake you at 600 nautical miles above the upper cloud deck of the planet," I said to Janet. "That will give you a three-minute window to cross over before we pass the 100-meter mark. You must be back aboard in that time. The Hyperion will have to fire its engines hard at the limits to create an orbit. Otherwise it will burn up too."

  I had been given back free will and normal speech. I had accepted that I no longer had a chance of saving the Cape Hatteras, and I was being rewarded for the decision.

  "The engines are ready to be started, but the crystals are reaching the main reactor. I'm going to have to hammer them away from it. I'll have to trust the computer to start the engines on its own and fly the ship. It's the only way I can keep the reactor running. You'll have to monitor the Cape Hatteras. If you see any deviation in course, you need to let me know. Can you do that, Cam?"

  "Yes. I'm feeling stronger now." I was starting to understand more. New thoughts flowed into my brain as if from nowhere—alien images, voices, and concepts—but they were not malicious. I understood what the future would hold if I weren't successful, and a very different universe it would be. I also was made to understand that the dark-matter vibration of the universe offered a vantage point unlike my own. They saw time from an outside perspective. They saw all possible outcomes and knew that there was only one choice, only one way.

  If anything survived of the crystals, we would fail. They showed me why we were at Saturn. There, in the gravity well of a giant planet, the weight of the crystals would ensure that they would make their way through the atmosphere deep into the planet's interior and entomb themselves forever in its dense core, an environment too gravitationally hostile to allow them to combine with dark matter and grow again.

  "Cam," Janet said, "the engine start sequence is beginning." I could hear that she was already hammering away at the crystals.

  I was struck speechless once more, but it wasn't by the Dark Matter Beings. It was by the sight of the Cape Hatteras, ahead of me and just to my port side, spraying a cloud of pure supercooled helium from its engine bells, followed immediately by the muted flashing of superheated compressed gas deep inside the ship. White flames burst out, stretching a third of the ship’s length. The nozzles shook and rotated to direct the raw power before settling into an intense white glow.

  Tears streamed down my face. I was watching the full glory of that legendary ship burst alive for the first time since John Andrew Nelson had commanded it. It was also the last time anyone would see it. It was the past and the present merging in the same moment, and I was proud that the ancient vessel could still muster its full strength. It would not die as a salvage wreck; it would find its end as the UNAG Mining Ship Cape Hatteras.

  "I have full power. The ship is gaining speed. We're going to make it, Cam."

  "It's beautiful. I wish you could see it," I said. In just a few hours Janet would be back with me, and we'd be watching the Cape Hatteras burn up from the safety of high orbit.

  Accompanying that comfortable thought was the departure of the last vestiges of pain. I laid my head down on the navigation screen. I was suffering extreme exhaustion in every part of my body. Just before I closed my eyes, I saw a quantum pad floating past my head. As tired as I was, I laughed. I must have hit a button because it was flashing red for recording and had captured every vision I had been given by the Dark Matter Beings in those hours on the Hyperion's bridge.

  Chapter 30 Gravity Well

  "Office of Rear Admiral Jonah T. Carlin. Admiralty Administration Complex, Union of North American Governments, Montreal, Province of Verbec. December 25, 2259. Eyes only, HALCYON clearance required. To the Director of UNAG Intelligence, Dr. Augustin Sato, Los Angeles, Province of Calorwa. Agent Salus’s log transmissions have grown erratic and nonsensical. He is being affected by the foothold phenomenon. We have no choice but to consider him a liability to the mission.

  "The ship does not have sufficient fuel to return to Earth remotely; therefore, you are herewith requested and required to terminate Agent Salus by implant activation. Then you will override his command of the ship and order the computer to decompress the UNAG Mining Ship Cape Hatteras at its current location near the Trojan asteroid 831240 Zarathustra located at the L1 Lagrange point of the planet Jupiter. Long-term stability at that position is critical. Under no circumstance can the ship be allowed to approach a major gravity source. You are to execute this order immediately and without delay.”

  "Cam, we've got a problem," Janet yelled between blows of her hammer. "I'm not going to make it."

  That statement was the first thing I remember after laying my head down. I had fallen asleep, but it was a natural one, uninterrupted by the Dark Matter Beings. I think it was the first real rest I'd had since I had left Titan. I wasn't certain how much time had passed, but I noticed that Saturn now completely filled the windows of the Hyperion's bridge. I must have been asleep for hours.

  "We're so close to Saturn," she said, "that the gravity is making the crystals grow faster. I can't keep up. The engineering compartment is mostly filled. They're going to overtake the main reactor and destroy it. It doesn't matter what I do now."

  I could hear her hammer crushing the crystals, followed by the snapping sounds as they hit the walls. She was speeding up and slowing back down as she alternately rallied and tired. She had been at it for hours, and I could tell from her voice that she was exhausted. The time had come for me to finish the job.

  I felt better, nearly normal again. I had given in to the Dark Matter Beings wholly, and it was too late for me to save the ship. It would now fall into Saturn sooner or later, no matter what I did. I was resigned to be the Dark Matter Beings’ instrument, compliant and ready to see their wishes through. The dark impulses had fallen silent.

  "How long do we have?" I asked Janet.

  "I'd say two hours tops. It's difficult to tell because the crystals’ growth is increasing so fast."

  I looked at the navigational instrument panels on the Hyperion. They revealed that, while I couldn't save the ship, it was still possible to do so with the right resources and enough time. The UNAG could still tow it with one of their powerful ships. We needed just under five hours to guarantee a fast and clean burn up.

  "We're going to have to tow it with the Hyperion," I said. "Once we get it close enough, we'll fire our engines. We'll need to get as much from them as we can and hope to hell we escape Saturn's gravity."

  "There's no guarantee we can do that, Cam. There's no safety margin. If we have an engine failure, we'll burn up just as surely as the Cape Hatteras will."

  "We've got to take that chance. Westmoreland said that this thing was a direct threat to Earth. That's the real reason we came out to Titan. We've saving our home planet."

  Janet fell silent for a moment. I hadn't told her that before. It wasn't in my report, but not out of any intent to deceive. I had simply stuck to the immediate threats and never thought to put the big picture into perspective. At that moment Janet knew that it had to be done as much as much as I did, no matter what happened to us.

  "Let out the tow line," she said quietly. "I'm leaving the reactors and throttling the ship up 110%. You'll need to compensate, but at least we'll g
et as much distance out of the engines as we can. Then I'll suit up and abandon ship, connect the tow lines to the Cape Hatteras's bow, and cross over to the Hyperion. I can't make it with my suit thrusters given all that engine wash out there."

  She was right. Suit thrusters are very imprecise things. An accidental drift in the wrong direction meant incineration. Climbing the tow line was safer but still very dangerous. If the Cape Hatteras's engines shut down while she was clinging to that line, it would go taut and kill her instantly. It wasn't a thick steel cable like what we had on the Amaranth Sun, those were dangerous enough. Instead, it was a thread-thin line of carbon nanotubes that could slice like a cheese cutter.

  I assumed manual control of the Hyperion and throttled to full power. I passed the Cape Hatteras and took up my position. I had only just reached it when I heard from Janet again.

  "Cam, I'm outside the ship. I'm making my way to the bow. I can see inside the portholes. There's blue light everywhere. It's gotten much brighter."

  I didn't want to hear that. If the anomaly formed and took Janet, I wouldn't be able to complete the mission. I'd have to call the military ship for help, and I didn't think they'd give any. They had been sending queries for hours trying to figure out what I was doing. In my condition I had been ignoring them.

  I watched Janet climb her way around the exterior and onto the flat nose of the Cape Hatteras. She connected the line quickly, but I could see the blue light intensifying through the ship's bridge windows. The crystals had reached critical mass, I concluded. I was terrified that at any moment the anomaly would take her.

  I watched as Janet hauled herself onto the cable and kicked off, covering 50 feet very quickly but then slowing from the friction of her gloves on the line. The Hyperion was accelerating fast to keep up with the Cape Hatteras. With both ships speeding up that rapidly, if she lost her grip there was a very real chance that she would be killed outright if she hit the derelict, which lay in a straight line behind her. It was a choice of that or burning up in the Hyperion's engine wash.