The Salvagers (26 page)

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 get 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.

             
I desperately tried to think of ways I could speed up the process and bring her to safety. I thought of trying to reel in the tow line, but there was no way its small motor could pull the entire mass of the
Cape Hatteras
closer. There was nothing I could think of to do. I could lose Janet, and it was then that I realized something that would change my life forever.

             
I guess I had been feeling it ever since I first saw her again all those months ago, but it hadn't been obvious to me. Maybe I should have realized it sooner, or better yet when we were still married. Because of my own stupid failings, it wasn't clear until I watched her trying to make her way to safety. I was still in love with that woman.

             
After an hour she was getting close, not more than twenty feet away. I had placed the ship on automatic navigation, hoping that the computer was better at calculating relative speeds than a human brain was. I suited up and sat in the rear airlock of the
Hyperion
. It must have been terrifying for her. The exhaust formed a ring of white fire that encircled her body, with her only option being to climb further into it.

             
As I watched her inch closer, my heart sank when I saw the
Cape Hatteras
's
lights go out and then flash once before going dead forever. We were out of time. Without someone hammering at them, the crystals had destroyed the reactor. The line would soon go taut when the engines failed. She wasn't going to make it.

             
I looked around, desperate to find some way of rescuing her, and then I saw it. There was a rope in the airlock. I think it was the same rope that I'd used to drag the crystals across the surface of Titan, though I couldn't tell you how it got there. I quickly lashed the rope to my suit and the other end to the lock’s opening mechanism. Then I jumped.

             
I fell twenty feet in less than three seconds, I could feel my spine strain to the limit as I ran out of rope. I was lucky it didn't tear a hole in my suit and vent my oxygen into space, but my luck held out. I pulled myself as fast as I could toward her. We were close enough to the airlock to be clear of the engine exhaust. Janet reached out and grabbed my hand, letting go of the tow line, as I pushed us away toward an engine bell.

             
It wasn't a half a second later that the
Cape Hatteras
's
engines died and the line tightened. I have no doubt, watching it vibrate, that it would have killed her and propelled her corpse back into the engine streams. We hung for a moment from the skimmerloon rope, safe enough, and took our time climbing back into the ship before shutting the airlock door.

             
"I'm so glad to see you. I thought I was going to lose you," I said as I pulled off my helmet.

             
"Honey, that was a hell of a move. You saved my. . . ."

             
"Honey?"

             
She paused for a moment. "Yes, I mean it this time," she said quietly.

             
"You know why I did that, don't you?"

             
"I hope I know."

             
"It's because I've never stopped being in love with you. I didn't want a divorce."

             
"I didn't either, Cam. I was just angry. You wouldn't put your adventures on hold to be at home and help me raise our son."

             
"I made a mistake, a selfish mistake. I knew it at the time. I tried to make up for it by taking Neil into space when he became a man, and every day I think about how I should have been there when he was younger. It's my greatest regret. You have to believe me."

             
"I do. I think he'd still like to see us together."

             
"I'm sure he would. I think I would too."

             
"Then let's do it."

             
I kissed her in front of the utility airlock window at the rear of the
Hyperion
. We looked out at the
Cape Hatteras
, which seemed to be watching us approvingly. Or maybe it was the Dark Matter Beings.

             
The anomaly must have been active on the derelict. Intuitively I knew that whatever malevolent power was at work was trying to seize the
Hyperion
, but it was somehow held in check by the Dark Matter Beings. They couldn't hold it at bay forever, though, so after I kissed Janet again we made our way down the corridor together and headed to the bridge.

             
What we found on the monitors reinforced my belief that the universe loves a good joke. After all the previous dangers and everything that could possibly go wrong doing it, there was yet another problem. The
Portsmouth
was rocketing  toward us at full speed. I tried to contact the crew, but now they were the ones who weren't answering.

Chapter 31    The
Portsmouth

              "United States Deep Space Geological Survey. Noctis Labyrinthus, Valles Marineris, Tharsis Region, Mars. January 25, 2078. Report of Dr. Leland Strunk, Ph.D., Chief Investigator of the Mars Geological Exploration and Sample Return (MGESR) Mission. We have completed the fifteenth manned exploration of the Red Planet and are preparing to depart in order to rendezvous with our return capsule. After exploring the Valleys of Mariner for the past six months, we are confident that we have gained a solid understanding of the deepest canyon system in the solar system and its extensive network of caverns.

             
"The caves have proven themselves to be the best candidates yet for the location of a permanent human settlement on Mars. The mouths of the caverns show evidence of fluid erosion, making their exploration a priority. We determined that this activity was recent, and it has led to the most important discovery of the mission. We found water in liquid form, salty and seeping from an aquifer deep within one of the caverns.

             
"I am confident that humankind will some day live here. We return home with many thousands of samples of water and rock, but most surprising are the crystalline minerals we found in the deepest levels of the caverns. They are completely new to science, and we believe them to be the most ancient rocks ever found on Mars. They are beautiful and black as night, but terribly cracked and shattered. We are uncertain what damaged them, but one thing is certain: they are important."

              The timing of the reactor failure slowed us down just enough for the
Portsmouth
to overtake us on the cusp of Saturn. If you haven't been through it, it's difficult to imagine what it's like to have a Poseidon-class cruiser bearing down on your ship and preparing for an attack. The power of their weapons and the efficiency of their practiced maneuvers make even the most seasoned captain of a merchant vessel look like an amateur. Finley Pace would never have stood a chance against the
Portsmouth
.

             
Despite its bulk the
Portsmouth
pivoted and changed direction so rapidly that it looked more like a high-tech fighter pod outmaneuvering a hostile bogey than it did something that would weigh a hundred thousand tons if it were sitting on Earth's surface. The battleship’s crew finally broke their silence when they had taken up a strategically favorable position above us, their guns trained squarely on the
Hyperion
.

             
"Captain Camden Hunter! You will drop your tow line immediately and send a confirmation of surrender. You will then move the
Hyperion
well clear and maintain a static position of ten kilometers off the starboard bow of the UNAG Mining Ship
Cape Hatteras
and await further instructions. If you do not comply within 60 seconds, we will fire on your vessel with lethal force."

             
They weren't mincing words, but I couldn't see any point in responding. I had no intention of complying, and my time was better spent trying to come up with some way of getting out that situation. I assumed that my apprehensions had been realized: the captain hadn't been satisfied with the orders of a dead man, and my long silence had only made matters worse. He contacted the admiralty for instructions, and they told him to secure the derelict at all costs. It seemed like such an obvious eventuality, but apparently the Dark Matter Beings didn't think it mattered. Otherwise they would have allowed me to maintain contact and keep up appearances.

             
Only a week earlier I might have let the military have the ship if things had gone a little differently. If they had confiscated it, the loss might have been easier to explain to Ed Iron than would the decision to destroy the ship. They were more qualified to deal with the anomaly than I was, at least technically. Neither the Dark Matter Beings or their foe would have allowed it, however. If I had tried to hand over the ship, they would have overridden me and forced me to complete the mission anyway, no matter what I wanted.

             
The next voice I heard on the radio was that of the
Portsmouth
’s captain speaking very deliberately. "Hunter, give it up. You haven't got a chance tactically, and none of your ships are armed. I don't want to have to take that antique by force and send you home in my brig. You can still stand down."

             
Yeah, I thought, stand down and go to prison. With all the secret information to which I had been privy, jailing me would be a priority for the UNAG. Even If I had done everything the captain asked, the admirals would still find a way to squirrel me away on some trumped-up charge of destroying a national treasure like the NASA probe. I knew they would use anything they could against me.

             
"I can't do that, Captain," I replied. "This ship needs to be destroyed. I think you know that yourself."

             
"I've been ordered to ensure that doesn't happen, Cam. Westmoreland may have wanted it away from Earth, but I know that he didn't want it destroyed. The admirals want it safely in Earth orbit, and they want it delivered fast and secretly."

             
"They're not scientists. They don't understand the danger it poses to Earth."

             
"Maybe not, but Westmoreland wasn't the only scientist in the solar system. Look, Cam. Think about it. We need to see what kind of weapon this is and make sure that it can't ever be used against us. Earth is the only place we can do that now. The research station on Titan is gone."

             
"It's not a weapon. It's a mistake, one that the Dark Matter Beings want corrected as much as anyone else. They didn't create the anomaly; it was some other power that we don't know anything about. But they were enabled by something we did. If we keep messing with this thing, we may well cause our own destruction."

             
"That may be true, Cam, but it's bigger than you and I. Isn't it best to let the finest minds in the UNAG figure this out?"

             
"The UNAG was playing around with things it didn't understand," I said. "And it allowed someone else to open a damned portal to a higher vibration of the universe."

             
"Cam. . . ," he began to remonstrate.

             
"And then they lost control of it, didn't they? That's the only thing that could ever unite the unions, a common threat so great that there was no other choice left. Well, that threat isn't what you said it was, is it? It's not the Dark Matter Beings; it's the anomaly itself and whoever created it. But you'd attack the Dark Matter Beings to keep it open so you can study it and turn it into a weapon in violation of your agreement with the other unions."

             
"It's not my choice, Hunter. I understand what you're saying, but I haven't got any alternatives."

             
He closed the channel. In less than the duration of a lightning bolt, the
Portsmouth
fired a deadly accurate laser cannon at the tow line and cut it cleanly. A shudder moved through the
Hyperion
's
frame that signaled the severance.
I watched the
Cape Hatteras
reel on the bridge’s monitor. The derelict lurched sideways as it was pushed away by the wash of our engines. The
Hyperion
's
full thrust was freed from its load and glued us firmly in our seats before the computer sensed the problem and cut the fuel feed, sending the engines to idle.

             
Janet and I found ourselves drifting in midair toward the bridge windows. I looked out. We were very close to Saturn now, well inside the orbit of its rings. Even with my nose pressed to the glass, I couldn't see all of its yellow globe. But I still didn't know whether we were close enough. The tow line’s severance had introduced new physics, and I didn't have a few hours for the computer to go through the calculations needed to determine whether the
Cape Hatteras
would burn up or enter an orbit. If I didn't do something decisive fast, the
Portsmouth
would get a tow line of its own on that drifting ship, and I could only watch them alter its trajectory and haul it off.

             
"Cam, look," Janet said. "The blue light is dimmer."

             
I looked at the display again. The light coming from the
Cape Hatteras
's
bridge windows was almost non-existent. It should have been much brighter that close to Saturn's gravity. The anomaly should have been running rampant, but it wasn't.

             
"We've got to get closer to the derelict," I said. "Set a collision course."

             
I wasn't thinking those words when I said them. I was trying to come up with a way to break any towline the
Portsmouth
might try to get on the derelict. Those words just tumbled out on their own, courtesy of the Dark Matter universe.

             
"You aren't serious!" Janet exclaimed.

             
"We've got to do it. If we ram the
Cape Hatteras
and break it into a million pieces, then they can't tow it. They'll never get a salvage ship out here in time to pick up the pieces before everything falls into Saturn."

             
Janet looked at me for a moment. She wasn't certain how I knew that the mission would be completed without the computer calculations, but I think for once she took me at face value. She glanced at the instrument panel hoping for some kind of verification but didn't see it. Still she set a new course. The
Hyperion
began a 180-degree roll and fired its engines at full thrust, sending us at high velocity directly toward the
Cape Hatteras
.

             
"It's going to collide, Cam. We've got to get off this ship," Janet said.

             
"Suit up and get out of here. I'll be right behind you."

             
"No, you won’t," she said. "You're in some other world again. I can tell. You want the anomaly to form, don't you? You think that, if you get close enough to it, the anomaly will destroy that warship."

             
"I want to destroy the anomaly, not form it."

             
My mind wanted one thing, but my mouth said another.
I
wanted off that ship and
knew that Janet was absolutely right, but something else was involved. I thought that the Dark Matter Beings wanted me to catalyze the reaction with whatever unique attribute I possessed, but I was wrong.

             
"Leave," I heard some entity say. It wasn't Janet saying it, and for once it wasn't coming from my mouth. It was a quiet and disembodied voice. Janet heard it too.

             
"Take the God-damn hint!" she said. "They want us both off the ship. You aren't the catalyst. It's something else!"

             
I couldn't explain it. Janet and the Dark Matter Beings both wanted me to leave, but something wanted me to stay. The war in my soul was rekindled. It was countered like return cannon fire by an overwhelming thought that if I had stayed a few more moments, I would have stayed forever and would die for nothing. I needed to leave before the wrong side won.

             
I followed Janet to the airlock. We suited up as fast as we could, and I hit the button to start the decompression cycle. Janet realized that there wasn't enough time before the ships would collide, so she broke the glass on the emergency release and pulled the lever. The lock decompressed violently and flung us several thousand feet into space in a matter of seconds. We stopped our momentum with our thrusters and spun to watch the collision. The
Hyperion
was just a few hundred meters from the
Cape Hatteras
when the
Portsmouth
began firing its guns.

             
It was an impressive sight. The
Portsmouth
’s guns were blazing in salvos of green and red beams, burning holes through the hull of the
Hyperion
as though it were made of paper. Then, in a flash of blue light, the
Portsmouth
vanished completely.

             
The anomaly then seemed to turn its attention to the
Hyperion
. The ship distorted slightly as though the ring were trying to encompass it too, but the anomaly seemed to run out of time and collapsed abruptly when the ships collided. The shattering and dispersing of the crystals aboard the
Cape Hatteras
must have disrupted its ability to exist.

             
The
Cape Hatteras
buckled as it impacted deep into the hull of the
Hyperion
, but its thick steel held out better than the salvor, which rotated in the collision and tore in half against the hulk of the derelict, disgorging gold bricks into a wide debris field.