The Salvagers (3 page)

Chapter 3     August

              Three months had passed since my conversation with Ed Iron. There had been little direct contact other than the reports I was sending every two weeks. I wrote them to sound adventurous, despite its being a simple survey, and his replies consisted of no more than two or three excited words about the mother lode. That hands-off approach was his biggest virtue. As long as he was kept regularly informed, he didn’t interfere.

              Ed's salvor was still months out, giving us plenty of time for the survey. We wanted to thoroughly
understand
the derelict. We photographed every weld and rivet and pored over each image for hours, thereby gaining confidence that when the time came we could get the job done safely and with a minimum of surprises. That did nothing, however, to relieve our feelings of anticipation. Those only grew worse until they finally gave way to outright impatience.

             
Our first hands-on experience with the ship came when we tackled the problem of stopping it from spinning. That was something we could try to do before the salvor arrived, so I declared the survey finished on the morning of day 92. When on a long salvage mission, you seize any opportunity you can to break the humdrum routine and celebrate. Kurt and Stacey marked the event with a "feast" consisting of dehydrated turkey and all the trimmings we could approximate . . . and my
last
bottle of whiskey.

             
The next day Stacey and I were discussing the specifics of just how we'd stop the ship from spinning when Kurt shot in to begin his bridge shift. He was smiling and energetic. He'd obviously had a good sleep after the whiskey the night before, but I think most of his energy was coming from coffee.

             
"Good morning! Do we have a solution?" he asked.

             
"We think so," I replied. "We'll have to deploy the pneumatic strap-thrusters first. Neil tells me that he can set them up inside of a week." Neil was the ship's engineer and my son, and also the best spacewalker among us. "We won't have to do any guesswork. The
Amaranth Sun
's computers will do all the calculating. When Neil says they're ready, Stacey will have the computer touch them off. It’ll be as easy as crashing into an asteroid."

             
"You hope," Stacey said wryly. She had a penchant for being a logical foil to my optimism.

             
"Always say it's easy. Then it has no chance of failure," I said, causing Stacey to roll her eyes.

             
"What can go wrong?" Kurt asked, a little disconcerted by Stacey's tone.

             
"Nothing," I said.

             
"Everything," she retorted.

             
She was right, of course. Things have a habit of never going as planned. The first snag we hit was the length of the straps. The
Cape Hatteras
was a huge ship, bigger than most vessels of our day. When Neil unrolled the straps, they didn't reach halfway around. He came up with a workaround by drilling holes in the outer hull plating and riveting the thrusters in place. He then put a spot weld around the edges for added strength, but the whole thing wasn't as sturdy as those braided nanolatch straps would have been. What started as a week's work grew to six, and when the time came to test the rig I was petrified.

             
I hadn't said anything to anyone, mainly because there weren't any alternatives, but I was skeptical that the plan would work. Neil's workarounds were often ambitious to a fault, and I'd never heard of anyone riveting thrusters in place. I worried they might tear a section of hull plating off and put an end to any easy way of pumping an atmosphere back onboard.

             
Stacey manned the thruster controls; Neil kept visual watch through a window; and Kurt and I monitored the data from the
Amaranth Sun'
s displays.

             
"Unless anyone has any objections, I think we're as ready as we can be," I said. No one objected.

             
"Ready. Four, three, two, . . ." At one Stacey hit the button.

             
A burst of white mist shot out of seven of the thrusters, but the eighth broke off and spiraled wildly into space.

             
"Daughter of a Ganymede flagellant!" Stacey exclaimed. "We lost one. Nice workaround Neil."

             
Neil and Stacey had a bad case of the usual rivalry between pilots and engineers.

             
"I said it was a workaround! Have you ever tried welding in space? That ship was spinning, taking turns freezing and boiling once an hour. That's hell on a makeshift weld joint," Neil responded defensively.

             
"Yeah, blah blah. Moon suits are clumsy. Don't forget to add that one too."

             
"Pilots have no sense of mechanics. You wonder why your ships break down all the time," he said. "Did you tell the computer to give it a little extra?"

             
That jibe hit home. Stacey had once burned out a reactor on a Roper Model 12 moon flyer during her training days. Those things are nearly impossible to break, and they're widely considered to be foolproof, but she managed to push it too hard and was left stranded on the Sea of Tranquility for a week until a crawler could pick her up. She lost five pounds living on crackers and mustard packets.

             
"It's still spinning," I said. "Could you two hold the rivalry until
after
we've figured this out?"

              "We'll have to use some of the reserve air," said Stacey. "I'd rather we didn't have to because we can't refill the thrusters without bringing them back onboard. We lost that option when someone
welded
them on," she said, firing a parting shot at Neil as he returned to his window. "Still, we've got good reserves, and I don't think we'll use them up completely in a second try. I don't see any other choice."

             
"Alright, do it," I responded, more than a little disheartened.

             
Stacey had the computer recalculate the ship's spin rate. It came up with an answer faster than I felt comfortable with.

             
"That's it?"

             
"It's your computer. It says it's ready."

             
That wasn't comforting. The
Amaranth Sun
's computers were
usually
reliable, but they were first and foremost navigational quantum computers. Using them for something else required the computer to write new software for itself. That usually meant glitches.

             
"Well, let's try this again."

             
This time Stacey didn't bother with a countdown. She just hit the button, and the thrusters fired almost too fast for the eye to see. I held my breath and hesitantly looked at my panel. I saw nothing but welcome, wonderful zeros.

             
"I think it worked," I said.

             
"Looks as though it’s stopped," Neil said as he checked the derelict visually.

             
"I think we’ve done it," I said. It took a moment to sink in before we broke into cheers. It was beautiful. The
Cape Hatteras
was sitting motionless with a slight dip to port just off our starboard bow. Stacey moved the
Amaranth Sun
alongside, leaving a space of about 50 meters between the ships.

             
"Next step," I said as everyone calmed down, "is to set up a scaffold around the center of the ship. We should have enough titanium pipe for it."

             
We'd never built a scaffold on a wreck before because it wasn't usually necessary. However, a fully intact derelict had to be treated as a ship in space dock rather than as a wreck. Cutting into the hull was an unfortunate necessity since handles can accumulate ice or jam from thermal fluctuation, so there's no way to open a hatch on a spacecraft from the outside.

             
"Shouldn't be a problem," Neil said. "I doubt it will take a week, and I'd definitely like to get rid of all that pipe. You ordered so much."

             
"Never know when you'll need it. Of all the things I've learned out here, you can't ever have enough pipe."

             
"You must have gotten it cheap.”

             
“That too,” I responded.

             
“You know, that ship doesn't look like a violent decompression at all," Neil said. "When you see it up close, you don't see any bent metal or debris. The windows are perfect, there's no cracks or frost on them."

             
"Can you see anything inside?" Kurt asked.

             
"No, just blackness and a few empty seats."

             
"Glad you looked and not me," I said. "I don't like the idea of seeing frozen bodies floating around. There's five of them over there
somewhere
."

             
Neil looked a little pale. I don't think he'd considered that certainty.

             
The pipe project went more smoothly than the thrusters did. Neil got the last bar welded in place six days later and then spent some time taking close-up photos of his work. We studied them as intently as we had with the hull pictures. I wanted everything to go smoothly after the episode with the thrusters, and there was still time to have Ed launch an express unmanned cargo pod with anything we might need, including a little whiskey.

             
About four months before the
Hyperion
arrived, we could do no more. The wreck was ready for salvage. With the scaffolding it looked as though it belonged to someone, and it was so thoroughly mapped that we knew the exact count of rivets the ship had—3,221,801. With nothing left to do, we were considering a trip to the Trojan asteroid. It was about five hours away by hyperboard and was likely loaded with interesting gemstones, perhaps even diamonds. Most comet diamonds were ugly and industrial-grade—Earth has plenty of those—but sometimes very large flawless ones can be found that dwarf anything back home. It was worth a look around, and I figured the crew could use some time off playing in the wide-open.

             
I'd walked on several trojans, so I volunteered to stay and mind the ships. I thought my crew would be in for a treat: dead comets are among the most alien-looking landscapes around. I promised that they would see amazing natural ice sculptures covered in coal-black carbon dust and large caverns through the porous surface, all surrounded by a halo of ice and gas that reminded me of a light fog on Earth.

             
We planned to get some sleep in shifts before they'd leave in the morning. I was looking forward to some time alone; I wanted to admire my prize without anyone’s bothering me. But then came the next disaster. It started when I awoke to Kurt’s yelling. He was floating in the air outside my door, his round face the only part of him poking inside.

             
"Cam! Someone's here! There's a ship!"

             
I acted instinctively, but my body was moving faster than my brain was. I pushed out of the bunk-bag violently, bounced off the far wall and hung in midair.

             
"What the hell are you talking about?" 

             
"There's some kind of ship about 35 kilometers out. They're not responding to communications. They've got to be jumping the claim," he said with urgency.

             
"Move us in close to the
Cape Hatteras
!" I ordered, grabbing a jumpsuit and slipping into it fast and forcefully. "I want them to know we own it."

             
I had been foolish in thinking that I could keep my find secret.

Chapter 4     Staking the Claim

             
You learn a different sense of urgency in space. A distance of 35 kilometers really means ten hours of difficult maneuvering before you can stop at just the place you want. I remember a really tricky project years ago as a hand on Will McInerny's legendary
MS City of Paris III
salvage. It had been making a delivery run to the newly founded Miranda colony at Uranus carrying a fortune in gold foil that was intended to be used as radiation shielding. They were making a  gravity-assisted course change through the Jupiter system, and an unorthodox low pass of Ganymede, when its tenuous atmosphere proved  enough to tear off a hull panel and expose a master fuel line. As soon as the sunlight hit it, the line superheated and the fuel tanks exploded in a chain reaction, one right after another, pulverizing the ship.

             
The crew escaped. Luckily the bridge was designed to serve as an escape pod and was jettisoned the moment the first tank blew, but the ship was a total loss otherwise. The foil had shredded into any number of inch-sized pieces that circled all the way around Ganymede, making it look like a miniature Saturn. The ship had exploded at such low altitude that we had to make constant course corrections to get it just right, besides dealing with the cumulative effects of the same friction that had wrecked the ship. Finally, we deployed a mesh net and collected the foil, but it took us five months just to get started. We considered that to be lightning-fast as far as working in space goes, though Will is still out there retrieving tiny bits of gold foil that we missed the first time.

             
We watched helplessly as the other ship made its slow approach. If there had been an information leak, they couldn't have gotten out there that fast on their own without our knowing. Ships are registered at every port they stop at, and Ed had people monitoring them all. No, these people had been lurking already, probably sitting somewhere nearby. Maybe they knew something about the
Cape Hatteras
that we didn't, or, worse, they had found it before us and were getting supplies. That scenario would make
us
the claim-jumpers.

             
The
Amaranth Sun
's bridge was in disarray. Stacey worked at her station faster than an ice miner on Oberon to learn whatever she could about the mystery ship. Her closed-top coffee cup was floating above her, leaking little globules that formed a tiny solar system around her head. Kurt meanwhile was nearly hysterical, looking as though the approaching ship was full of pirates ready to fire a broadside. He scrolled through a listing of every active ship's radio identification number, but I don't think he could have found it at the speed he was going.

             
"What do you have, Stacey?" I asked.

             
"I think it's a salvor. I can't tell which one. It has a beacon, but we haven't found it in the listings yet. No idea what size it is. We can only see it head-on, but from the diameter I'd say it’s at least a 300-foot ship."

             
"Could be armed. You know what happened at Europa," Kurt chimed in.

             
Talk like that sent an icy chill down everyone's spine. That robbery had irreversibly changed the equation for anyone working in space. Jupiter's moon Europa was one of Earth's many official colonies, but it was the odd one. A group had gone out there a few decades ago to create a utopia, drilling beneath the surface to reach the abundant heat and water below. But they were dreamers and didn't take the slightest precaution to defend their colony. They grew their own food but also
other,
more illicit plants, which they shipped back to Earth in little capsules that fell somewhere different every time. They were always one step ahead of the authorities and were masters at skirting the issue diplomatically.

             
About a year ago a ship with no beacon fired a shot, cracking the ice near the settlement and sending a column of water spraying into space until it froze solid before crashing back to the surface, dropping boulders of ice just feet from their colony's domes. The pirates admittedly had style. They sent a message that read: "Arrrgh! Ye know what we want." They then appropriated the year's crop, which was packaged and awaiting transport later that week.

             
No one knows who the pirates were, and the unions had little reason to patrol for them. They were too busy keeping up their old rivalries and worrying about what rock belonged to which union, though none of them wanted lawless Neptune or the outer reaches of the solar system. It was the first time anyone had ever armed a ship in space with an old-fashioned projectile cannon—a really big one. I was surprised that we hadn't seen piracy in space before then. It seemed natural, since there's so little law enforcement and so many places to hide.

             
"It's not the pirates, Kurt. They never struck again. They're probably retired on a private island somewhere on Earth, permanently high and giggling about the size of their bank accounts. Besides, the
Amaranth Sun
is fast. We can get away from just about anyone once we get moving," I said.

             
He seemed to calm down a bit, and Stacey finally got around to gathering up her coffee blobs.

             
"Still," I added, "we should be prepared for anything. What can we do to keep them from taking the
Cape Hatteras
?"

             
"Easy," said Stacey. "Spin it."

             
"Honey, how are we going to do that?" asked Kurt before I had a chance to pose the same question. Kurt and Stacey were long-time partners in love and work.

             
"Fire the thrusters using the last of the reserves. I think we can spin that thing to at least five revolutions a minute, maybe more. Once our salvor gets here, we can attach lead-tipped inertia weights to slow it back down. The claim-jumpers haven't got that kind of time. Soon we'll have them outnumbered two to one, and I doubt they'd outnumber our crew," Stacey said. We expected to have 30 more personnel when the
Hyperion
arrived.

             
"And we hold a wildcard. Since they know, it won’t make much difference if the whole solar system knows too. I can radio a press release announcing the find of the
Cape Hatteras
and have all eyes on us in minutes," I said.

             
I didn't want to do any of that, however, unless I had no other choice. It could take weeks to stop the
Cape Hatteras
from spinning again, and that's assuming we'd be able to get the inertia weights to work. Those things are notoriously tricky. They consist of a powerful magnet that sticks to the hull after being fired from a compressed-air gun. Attached to the top is a reel and a heavy lead weight that rolls out fifty feet or so. The effect is to slow down the rotation like a spinning ice-skater extending her arms, but they need to be in precisely the right places, and they must land mechanism up. That's not always how it works out.

             
Still, it was a solid option. Since we had found the
Cape Hatteras
already rotating, I had requested an ample supply of inertia weights. Most wrecks don't require them. The weights are heavy and expensive, so it was unlikely that the claim-jumpers had any with them.

             
The only question I had was whether the thrusters lacked enough reserve air to spin the wreck fast enough. If the thrusters failed, and we were going to have to fight for it, we'd need to grapple the
Cape Hatteras
and hit the engines hard. We lacked the power to tow it, so we would have to send it twirling at high speed into deep space. The encroachers would never be able to get a man on it to fix strap-thrusters, but that approach also meant that the wreck might end up spinning on more than one axis. The derelict would then be nearly unsalvageable.

             
When I entered the engine room, Neil had a panel off the ceiling and was floating motionlessly while peering into it.

             
"Neil, how are my engines?" He hadn't heard me glide in. Zero-G makes for quiet movement.

             
"You scared the hell out of me," he said. 

             
"Sorry."

             
"Your engines are fine, but your electrical power isn't. Remember that burning smell from a while back?"

             
"Yes," I said hesitantly, growing concerned. When we were working on securing the NASA probe to the
Amaranth Sun
's side, the whole ship suddenly smelled like melting plastic. In a closed oxygen-rich atmosphere, that's dangerous. Fires are almost always deadly on ships in space.

             
"Well, you know, it was just a short. Not a serious problem, or at least it hasn't become one. We don't carry much extra wire onboard because it's not usually something that fails. So I rigged it, using what I had. But the gauge is too small, and I've been keeping an eye on it ever since. If you have to accelerate beyond normal parameters, it might fail. You'll still have your engines, but you won't be able to steer."

             
"We'll just have to hope it holds together," I said. I trusted my son's judgement. He was a natural engineer, as far as running a ship was concerned. He had just turned 25 and could rig his way out of anything. But when he was worried, I was worried. It meant that he couldn't think of a contingency plan.

             
"Cam, we've got a radio message up here," Stacey yelled.

             
I shot back to the bridge. The first thing I did was to peer out at the approaching ship through a porthole. It was closing much faster than it should have been. Worse, even though it was still 20 kilometers away, you could already discern lighted bridge windows in the telescope. That detail confirmed that it was a big ship and that, if it were a salvor, it could easily handle the
Cape Hatteras
. There could have been a crew of twenty or thirty on a ship that size.

             
Just then the radio console flashed. The strong signal strength made it clear that it originated from the other ship.

             
"Cam Hunter, looks like you've found a fish bigger than you can reel in," a voice said.

             
I recognized it immediately. It was Finley Pace, a salvager like me but also a notorious claim-jumper. He had the most gravelly voice I've ever heard.

             
"Well, at least you admit it's mine. That's more than you do for most people," I said.

             
"Oh, I'll go that far, but there's no way you'll salvage it with that mouse of a ship you have."

             
"I've got another one on the way from Earth. It will be here in just a few days."

             
"You're going to be waiting a lot longer than that," replied Pace. "Earth is ten months away for a salvor, and I know you haven't been here that long. I've been tailing you since you picked up that old NASA probe. So what ship do you think it is?"

             
"Just an old cargo vessel. Can't find any records on it." I was grasping at straws. At any moment he could train a telescope on the derelict and see what we had.

             
"We could always cut a deal, split it 50/50, and have it done before the government gets involved," Pace said, trailing into a cough. He once had a successful business working on salvaged spacecraft and returning them to service but destroyed his lungs in a decompression accident.

             
"I appreciate that, but my investors won't go for it. I've already got the funding and percentages worked out and inked."

             
"That's a shame. I'd have loved to do the
Cape Hatteras
all nice and legal," he said, revealing that he had known all along the find’s identity. "But you don't have a way to secure that ship, and you can't stop me from taking it in tow."

             
"I'll rope it and spin it so fast that it will just be a blur, Finley. You won't see the inside of it for a year or more, and by that time my salvor will be here and you'll be outnumbered."

             
Finley dropped communication without a response. I glanced out the window again. All I could see was his ship surrounded by a bright white halo. He'd hit his main engines hard and was coming our way. He meant to ram us.