The Salvagers (5 page)

             
"Or the UNAG government still doesn't want it revealed that they lied about the footage."

             
"That would make sense. They wanted an open-and-shut case with no questions asked. Something straightforward such as that the ship was hit by a meteor and violently decompressed. If other factors were involved, a bad component installed by a lobbyist’s contractor or something of that nature, then it might have been worth covering up and keeping it that way."

             
"Or they just wanted to get past the fact that a huge investment had just disappeared with no return. I would have wanted to bury it and move on too. Did the researcher discover anything new about the actual cause?"

             
"No, she didn't, but the investors saw your photographs of the
Cape Hatteras
and concluded that something wasn't quite right. They hired naval historians, archeologists, and engineers, all of whom are here now, and they all agree on one thing: the ship did not suffer a violent decompression."

             
"So what do they think happened?" I asked. Our suspicions were confirmed, but the academic side of it was news to me.

             
"No consensus yet. We'll find out when we go in," he said.

Chapter 7     Day 178

              Captain Keating asked me to stay for dinner aboard the
Hyperion
. I considered declining because I wanted to get back to the
Amaranth Sun
, but I sensed that the invitation was a veiled order from Ed Iron. The occasion was to be an official question-and-answer session that would make its way home as an independent report.

             
The dinner started out very ceremonially. I have problems with formality, always feeling out of place. Keating dined with his officers and the academicians from Earth at a long table in one of the gravity sections separated from the general crew. The
Hyperion
was a nice ship, but it was still designed to be a utilitarian salvor—except in the officers’ mess. It was large and lavishly decorated. Oak paneling lined the walls, and the ceiling had a fixed crystal chandelier ingeniously designed to look as though it were floating freely, all lending the room the feel of an expensive restaurant. Most remarkable was the transparent floor that revealed the rotating star fields, giving the impression of traveling in a glass-bottomed boat in space. I'd never seen anything quite like it. The room was darkened enough that you could discern the individual colors of the stars glowing like white, red, and blue gems from a shipwreck at the bottom of a coal-black ocean. The view was distracting. I had to make a conscious effort to maintain eye contact with the people sitting around the table.

             
Full maritime protocol was observed. Keating sat at one end of the table and I at the other as the captains present. I looked past the two rows of faces that led to Keating, who gave the impression of a lawyer preparing for a cross-examination with an almost regretful look on his face, as though he weren't relishing the idea of grilling me in front of the others.

             
The scene reminded me of the old 18th-century Royal Navy ships. I was in the position of the captain who had lost his ship to mutineers and was being dragged back to the admirals amid an air of absurd civility. Keating was a Yorkshire native and an old Eurorussian naval man—they were known to cling to tradition—and that led me to expect his questioning to be tough. I had little reason to be concerned, but words can be misinterpreted with disastrous results, so I tried to prepare myself as best I could in the short time it took for everyone to settle in.

             
"Captain Hunter, if I may ask, how is it that your ship has ended up dead in space while the
Cape Hatteras
is spinning?" Keating asked, finally breaking the awkward silence.

             
The question was blunt, as I expected, but I was somewhat relieved. I was ready for that one after having written my report to Ed Iron. All I had to do was to paraphrase it. I wouldn't have been prepared for a question about why my communications receiver was turned off. I'm not sure that power conservation to keep the toilets flushing would have been an acceptable answer, and I was worried that my first impression on the scientists would be a jumble of excuses.

             
"We were attacked by a claim-jumper," I said, spinning my story before Keating had time to respond. I told them about a succession of close scrapes, which weren't all that close, embellishing freely. Everyone was staring at me absolutely captivated. Thankfully none of my crew, especially Stacey, was there to dispute any details of my narrative.

             
"His ship missed us by inches," I elaborated, "but it was too much for my poor jury-rigged
Amaranth Sun
. We lost
everything
. I had to suit up and spend a week working inside the exhaust bells just to get the engines back."

             
Our engines had never gone offline, but a cold start of a ship's engines made for a harrowing story.

             
"I was never sure whether the reactors would accidentally come back online and incinerate me. But here I am! And we're all in for a treat, my friends. Answers to one of the greatest historical mysteries
and
the derelict’s vast treasure lie right outside. More gold than any human eyes have seen in two centuries, and it's ours," I said, sweeping my arm with a flourish as a fine view of the
Cape Hatteras
presented itself through the floor, as if on cue.

             
My audience gasped and applauded. I knew that at least half of them had enough engineering knowledge that they must have known I was dramatizing, but a good story is a good story nonetheless, and making yourself popular during a first encounter is essential. My ploy worked: Keating never asked about the receiver.

             
We spent the rest of dinner in deep discussion about the adventure to come, and by the end of it Keating was just as engaged and excited as everyone else. I think he was relieved that his boss would be satisfied with everything I'd said. I left the
Hyperion
with a feeling of success in endearing myself to everyone, helped in the end by copious quantities of French brandy.

             
I got back onboard the
Amaranth Sun
at about midnight. I hadn't had a drink since our whiskey celebration of months before, so I hadn't been inclined to moderate my intake at dinner. I made my way to my cabin hoping that I wouldn't run into anyone. I was so drunk that my hands were slipping off the handholds, and at one point I had to close one eye to see where I was going. I made it to my quarters and zipped myself into the bunk-bag, even though I wasn't all that sleepy.

             
I was in that state of intoxication where your mind is churning, not yet at the stage of passing out. Maybe I should have had one more drink. I kept going over what Keating had said when I first boarded the
Hyperion
. The
Cape Hatteras
did not look like a wreck that had violently decompressed. It looked like a mothballed ship waiting to be brought back into service.

             
Eventually I fell asleep. I don't think anyone could have woken me without extreme difficulty. My dreams were nothing short of strange. I remember one in which I saw myself and my crew dead and frozen on the
Amaranth Sun
. I felt that somehow we had died from a disease that we had contracted on the derelict. That wasn't possible, the low temperatures the derelict had sustained for centuries would have sterilized it, but it was still disconcerting.

             
The next morning the
Hyperion's
crew got to work immediately on the
Cape Hatteras
. Their first step was to deploy the magnetic inertia weights. It took them over a week in 24-hour rotating shifts. They took great care, planning every step and going over any potential snags to ensure they were ready. It paid off: they attached them with no mishaps.

             
It was beautiful to watch them operate. The velocity of the spin reduced as they let out the line, leaving the
Cape Hatteras
in a rhythm of slow rotations, much as we'd initially found her. Then they installed sophisticated hydrazine rockets, much better than pneumatic thrusters, to bring it to a complete stop.

             
Our situation was much improved. The rockets had plenty of fuel, and someone had the foresight to look up the diameter of the
Cape Hatteras
and send straps long enough to encircle the ship. More importantly, they were 360-degrees directional so that we could maneuver the derelict remotely from the
Hyperion
and have some evasive-action capability if Finley Pace showed back up.

             
In addition, we set a slow, meandering course to throw off any calculations Pace might perform to locate us, changing the heading of our group periodically, with only Keating and I knowing when and where the salvage operation would occur. If you take precautions like that, it is impossible to be located based on your previous positions. Finley would have to search by using telescopes and time-lapse photographs, which could take years. I was satisfied that Pace was no longer a concern, even if he did leak word about the discovery. Still, I intended to soil his name from Earth to Pluto for what he had tried to pull.

             
We rebuilt the scaffolding around the
Cape Hatteras
, work I found frustrating because I don't like to do the same thing twice. On December 24, 2409, we were ready to cut into the hull. We celebrated Christmas Eve onboard the
Hyperion
. One of the crew played guitar quite well, banging out tunes all night while we sang along. He mentioned that he wanted to eventually play professionally. I wondered if he realized that he would soon be so wealthy that he could do whatever he wanted.

             
On Christmas Day, back on the
Amaranth Sun
, I set up a "tree" consisting of a bunch of dried rosemary twigs from the galley. I crowned the bundle with a flashing stick-on emergency beacon without thinking. The light blinking through the galley’s porthole prompted the
Hyperion
to call and ask whether we needed assistance. Everyone went to bed early that night, for the next morning we planned to start cutting into the hull of the
Cape Hatteras
. Excitement made sleep difficult. I couldn't have gotten more than four hours before Kurt popped in to wake me.

             
By the time I had finished my obligatory two cups of coffee and suited up, there was already a large crowd maneuvering through the scaffolding.

             
"You're finally here. We're ready to begin," my ex-wife said.

             
"It's 6:00 a.m. I'm not late. I'm on schedule."

             
"You always were a slow mover in the mornings. Early bird gets the worm, spacebrain," she said, flashing me a dirty look through the glass of her helmet.

             
Janet then gave a thumbs-up to two men on either side of the target area. They pulled down their gold-plated visors, and a moment later their plasma cutters fired blindingly. It was so intense as to be hard to watch, but I couldn't help myself. Janet saw me struggling to shade my eyes and pulled down my visor, taking a swipe at me for not remembering that I had one.

             
At nearly the halfway mark we hit something, a bulkhead that wasn't on the ship's blueprints, behind the hull plating. That's not unusual. When you build a ship, sometimes things don't end up as the plans might suggest. Certain areas might be shored up with an extra rib, or a dividing wall might be installed afterwards. The torches we were using weren't going to be able to penetrate it.

             
It cost us several hours to bring a heavy-duty torch over from the
Hyperion
. They tested it before applying it to the hull. The torch shot out a stream of fire easily 60 feet long, making it look like a flamethrower, but when they applied it to the hull, all you could see was an intense pinpoint of light. I worried that it might damage the interior of the ship when it burned through.

             
At 2235 hours the cut section floated free, and they signaled for me as the cutting crew withdrew. I motioned for everyone to tune to the global comm frequency so that whatever I said would be audible to all. I had planned to make a speech, but when the moment came it didn't seem appropriate. Everyone had been waiting all day. I simply said, "Here goes!" and peered into the blackness.

             
"I can't see anything," I reported.

             
The problem was that none of the lights on the scaffolding were pointing directly into the ship. I turned on my head lamp. Still nothing. Then I remembered the visor. I figured that I might as well get some laughs out of my gaffe, so I turned around and lifted it. After the laughter stopped, I said, "Alright. Let's try this again."

             
I had read a book years ago about Howard Carter and the moment he broke through to King Tutankhamun's tomb in Egypt. He could see statues and riches, but all I could see was part of the far wall of the corridor. I poked my head in a little further and saw a black passageway leading away in either direction. It led to unimaginable treasures and mystery, so when someone asked on the comm what I could see, all I could do was to parrot Carter. "Wonderful things," I said.