The Salvagers (22 page)

             
I ran from the lab and screamed for everyone to evacuate as I made my way to the hub and past the conference table. I am uncertain why, but I felt compelled to grab the crystal lying on it, pocketed it, and made my way to the airlock. When I had finished with suiting up, I hit the recompress button. I turned and saw Dr. Lyman—five identical copies of him—trying to put on suits on the other side of the glass door.

             
The exterior door opened with a slight pop. I stepped out not knowing what I should do next. I then remembered the skimmerloon shed Westmoreland had mentioned, and I walked into the Titanian wilderness until I spotted it barely visible a few hundred feet away. I made my way toward it, feeling a stiff wind trying to drag me backwards. Finally making it to the shed, I opened the door and glanced back long enough to see blue light emanating from every window in the station, all of them broken and sucking Titan's poisonous air into the building. Almost immediately the oxygen inside mixed with it, and flames erupted before the building crumpled and began to implode. I was the only one who had escaped.

             
I slammed the door and saw the skimmerloons parked in a row. They were a sort of pod, pressurized with an atmosphere, on skids and tracks but with a large compartment attached to the rear. After I climbed into one that looked the newest, the cockpit closed around me and pressurized. A green button marked "Deploy" flashed on the panel in front of me. I took my helmet off and pressed the button, assuming that it was the first step in starting the craft. I was wrong. Opening the shed door should have come first. The craft shot forward through it and dashed into the landscape beyond. I heard the compartment behind me blast open and release the balloon, filling it with hot gas in an instant.

             
The high speed was nerve-wracking. The balloon was enormous, rising rapidly into the air and being pushed by the wind and its engines. It dragged the cockpit on its skids, violently bumping over large chunks of ice. It was obvious that it wasn't supposed to operate that way, so I frantically searched the area around me for any kind of control that I hadn't previously noticed. Near my left thigh I saw a lever that had a vertical arrow sign on it. I hoped it wasn't an eject mechanism, but I took a chance. When I pulled it, the pod rose rapidly into the air, gaining even more speed.

             
I tried to make sense of the instrument panel and managed to find a map function. Accessing it, I saw a layout of the Titanian surface along with the course I was following. There was only one other feature on the map: a yellow dot marked with a series of numbers. I hoped that it designated the main colony. I placed my finger on the dot, praying that it would steer the skimmerloon.

             
The craft seemed to right itself, settle down, and head in a straight line for that yellow dot. But it was covering kilometers in seconds, so fast that I feared I might pass it. I had no idea how to stop the skimmerloon, so I frantically tried hitting the deploy button again. The balloon began to descend and retreat into its bay. I realized that I was still in the air and had not bothered to land the damned thing. My judgement must have been badly affected by the crystal in my pocket.

             
The skimmerloon fell, but in the low gravity its descent was more an uncontrolled float to the ground than a real crash. When I hit, it was hard, but not enough to injure me. I at least had the presence of mind to put my helmet back on as the craft skidded to a dry lake bed and onto a plain of house-sized pieces of ice before rolling end over end until coming to rest against a boulder. The canopy was broken and the orange atmosphere was seeping in like smoke. If there were a damaged wire or some other source of ignition, the whole compartment could explode. I put my helmet on and opened the canopy as fast as I could, dumping myself headfirst onto the ground below.

             
I had to get rid of the crystal, I thought, but it was sealed inside my suit. I remembered advice from the survival manual. I opened my helmet just enough to reach in and grab the crystal. Frostbite burned my neck as I zipped the suit closed. I dropped the crystal and fell to my knees, then onto my face, and there I slept for hours bathed in the crystal’s bright blue glow holding back the ruddy orange hues of Titan.

Chapter 26     Dreamscape

             
"December 23, 1700 hours. Log of Captain John Andrew Nelson, Commanding Officer, UNAG Mining Vessel
Cape Hatteras
. Gravity’s power has been revealed to me in an epiphany given from the perspective of a god. It is a gift to our universe that allows it to exist. It is a crutch to give me strength and understanding. It feeds the crystals and grows them."

             
I saw a man standing deep in black fog. Shrouded, faintly outlined, and wispy, he shimmered against a field of nothing else that my human eyes could see. He had no sharp lines, no reference points to lend clarity to my vision. His indistinctness made him feel like the presence sensed when there is someone in the room that you cannot otherwise see.

             
I stepped closer, hoping to see him better. It was like looking through a prism at a man. I saw his back, sides, and front but never all of him at once. He was like a twisting kaleidoscope, parts of his image lingering as others evolved into something new. He seemed like a shattered representation of the human form, looking at me, I believed, with comparable feelings of mystery and incomprehensibility. I saw a face flash across his visage. It was me. Then again it was Captain Nelson and all the others it had encountered in the past. Hundreds of faces flashed in a series, some old, some young, some bearded, some male, some female, and then finally me again.

             
But the faces weren't quite right. They were something like clay statues looking at the people who were their subjects. They were approximations or facsimiles made without a clear knowledge of how a human being actually appears to another person.

             
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.