After about thirty minutes, I saw the telemetry readouts shift when the composition stream from the drill changed to show nearly pure platinum being mined. My earlier disquiet with Wraith’s reactions faded under the prospect of finding real wealth. It was ‘The Big Strike’ some spacers were always going on about, I thought.
I turned to face the captain. “Treasure ahoy.” I knew I had this idiot grin she hated on my face, but what the hell—I might be able to buy my own ship with my share of the take.
She only grunted something indistinct in reply. The engineer’s language skills were apparently catching, I thought, and had to suppress a laugh.
Hours passed slowly as Wraith and his drill proceeded to work a healthy chunk of the platinum out of the asteroid. Coffee helped pass the time. Still, things stayed nice and quiet aboard the Pat Hand, and I eventually got bored watching the slow progress. The latest ore values we’d downloaded at our last port gave me something to do, at least: trying to figure out just how wealthy we were going to be. I looked over at the captain now and again, but she seemed absorbed in something on her hand console. Curious as to what it was, I queried the computer and learned she was reviewing the video footage we’d gotten during salvage of the Errant Thought.
When Wraith’s drill had amassed its full capacity—eight kilograms of particulate platinum, approximately ninety nine percent pure—he deactivated it, secured it to his suit, and released his contact. He kicked off and quickly made the trip back to us, re-entering the airlock.
I watched it cycle and re-pressurize. I was sick and tired of the morose quiet, so I whistled appreciatively as I turned in my chair to face her. “What a score, Captain! At current prices, we’re talking one-point-three million credits just for what we’ve mined so far, and there’s tons more waiting in that deposit!”
She shook her head. “We’ve got enough. We’re leaving as soon as Wraith’s back aboard.”
“What?” I couldn’t believe what I’d heard. “But it’s right there for the taking! I mean, Wraith could head back after he rested up—we’ve got nearly two days before we’d have to change orbit even a bit! He could go back at least two or three times, even with full shift breaks in between …”
“It’s enough,” she interrupted.
“Enough? We could each be richer than Ceres Colony if we just …”
“It’s enough.” I saw that her mouth was now just a thin line. “I don’t like it.”
“Don’t like what?” The sharpness of my frustration came out overly loud even to my own ears, and I wondered for a moment if I hadn’t pushed her too far.
She didn’t say anything for a minute, just stared at the footage on her console while I waited impatiently for her to say something. When she did, her voice was softer than I’d expected. “You ever wonder how the crew of the Errant found this lode, Derek?”
“They must have been prospecting and found it, looking for a good score. Or maybe someone sold them the data.”
“With how much that ore lode is worth, no way someone sold it to them. As far as prospecting, good enough, but tell me how did they know to do close scans on this particular rock?” She tapped her console distractedly. “It’s nothing special: C-types make up about three quarters of all the asteroids anyway. Basically, there are gazillions of them around, and this one doesn’t stand out particularly much from anything else in the vicinity, does it?”
“Okay, so I have no idea how they found the damn thing.”
“And that doesn’t bother you?”
“Heck no! They must’ve had some kind of lead, or else got close enough to this sucker for some other reason. It could have been pure luck—it’s happened before!” I found myself waving my arms around, and brought them down self-consciously and lowered my voice as well. “Whatever, however it happened, they got the scan data on that platinum and went to work.”
“This asteroid’s a needle in a stack of needles, Derek. Let me ask you another question: having found the ore here, did they mine the goddamned thing?”
“Well, I mean, wouldn’t they have … ?”
“If they did, where was the platinum they found? We didn’t see any on the Errant.”
“How should I know?” I didn’t like that I suddenly felt like I was on the defensive. I shifted in my seat.
“They had a drill like ours on board: you saw it on board, but no ore. Next question: did you see any sign of a bore-hole on the asteroid here?”
“No,” I said, thinking about that. “But …”
“But it doesn’t make sense, right? If they were here, and they had both the drill and the lode’s location, why wouldn’t they mine some of the ore before they left? And if they had, where was it? And why the hell were they headed out-system instead of in—where all the markets for the stuff are?”
I floundered, lost in her logic. “I don’t know.”
“Well, figure it the hell out before we go anywhere.” She stood abruptly. “I’m going to check on Wraith.”
I was still speechless as she left the bridge, but my mind was already turning the problem over like the Pat Hand on autopilot. I needed to break down the problem into bite-sized pieces. Did the crew of the Errant Thought actually drill here? “Computer, full scan mode.” I linked in and my senses bloomed in that euphoric sense of unfolding it always did. “Show me hyper-tracking of all regolith disturbed during Wraith’s drilling of the asteroid over the last three hours.”
I waited as the computer compressed the sensor data into two minutes of time-lapse which showed the small amount of debris launched from the surface during the engineer’s extraction of the platinum. “Based on asteroidal mass and gravity, project time course for all disturbed regolith and display in compressed mode. Also, account for what percentage of regolith might be lost and beyond local gravity’s attraction.”
As the computer pursued its calculations, my hand unerringly found my coffee despite my otherworldly vision. It was cold. Bleh.
And then I saw something in the data stream which made me drop the cup. “What the hell was that? Computer: replay sequence.” In the speeded-up view of the sensor tracking I saw something I would have otherwise missed in real-time, but I had to review the sequence twice more before I was sure of what I was seeing. I heard the bridge door open just as I murmured: “But that doesn’t make any sense, does it?”
“What doesn’t make any sense, Derek?”
I withdrew from full immersion in the sensory equipment and turned: both Renault and Wraith had come onto the bridge. “Found something odd, but it’s preliminary. Let me put it up on the main screen.”
The scan data, unenriched by the subjective experience of senses fully enhanced, was far less exciting, though the display was adequate. I ran it through first at slow speed, then at the compressed rate.
Wraith made a surprised noise and pointed at the video.
To my surprise, I understood him before the captain. “Yes, exactly.”
Renault looked from her engineer to me. “What?”
“I had the computer go back through Wraith’s drilling and look at the regolith he’d disturbed. Now, the gear’s designed to be nearly completely recoilless so as to avoid major displacement in zero gravity and shoving either the operator or the ore away. But there’s inevitable scatter of regolith which happens. Since the kinetic energy of it all is pretty low, the debris that’s kicked up during the drilling ends up coming back to the asteroid based on its tiny gravity field.”
Wraith nodded when the captain looked his way.
“So I followed the little fragments with hyper-tracking, all those project orbits and paths and if anything was lost to space or if everything returned. That was when I saw this.” I highlighted a tiny blip of a will-o-wisp on the screen and followed it as it moved in real-time along a linear path from out-system to the asteroid. Then, a few seconds later, highlighted another.
A sound like someone gargling gravel came from behind me, and I turned around to see Wraith animatedly
jabbering at Renault.
“He’s right,” I said. The captain looked at me sharply. “No, I don’t really understand what he’s saying, not like you do Captain, but he’s seeing things from an engineer’s perspective. That track is linear and doesn’t make much sense: that’s what jumped out at me, too.”
Renault frowned. “Explain it to me so I can understand. What are we seeing and why is it significant?”
I glanced at Wraith and he gestured impatiently at me to continue. “In full-immersion scan, those little bright sparks I’ve tagged are particulate platinum, tiny particles moving from out-system to the asteroid.”
“From where?”
“Pretty much on a direct line to where we found the derelict, Captain. Correcting for drift and such.”
“Well. Damn.”
Wraith made a noise, his face unhappy.
“Neither am I,” Renault told him, “but we’re going back to them.”
“Um, Captain?”
“What, Derek?”
“Do we really need to solve this? I mean, we have over a million creds worth of ore in our hold … can’t we go sell that before we retrace our steps to a dead ship we already tagged for later salvage?”
She thought about that for fully a minute. “No. Set course and go. I don’t pretend to understand what we’ve found ourselves in the middle of, but I will be damned if I don’t try to figure it out and make sure that what happened to the Errant doesn’t happen to us. So get us there.”
I thought about another plea to greed, but gave it up immediately as a bad play. Instead, I set course and engaged the drive and the ship began moving out-system. I set it on auto and announced: “I need some rack time.”
“Go ahead. You too, Wraith—you look like you’ve been through the waste recycler. I’ll stay here and mind the ship.”
The engineer and I left the bridge together. On the other side of the hatch he tapped my arm and I turned to him. Close up, I could see the swelling around the eyes that had accumulated during his EVA and which hadn’t yet fully resorbed in ship’s gravity. He grimaced.
I tried to guess what was on his mind, knowing we might need to go to the old text standby which had served since I’d come aboard. “You still don’t like it.”
He agreed with a nod, and held up a finger.
“And?”
He pointed vaguely along the lines of our course with his finger toward the bridge.
“Right. Headed out-system to recheck …”
He interrupted my interpretation by assuming a resigned look on his face and dragging his finger across his throat in a gesture that went back before sea-going ships were a racy concept.
I licked dry lips. “Let’s hope for better, huh?”
He shook his head and went ahead of me and into his own cabin without another look. I shivered, even though I was sure the temperature hadn’t changed an iota under computer control, then went to my own and lay down. I didn’t remember falling asleep.
The ship-wide emergency alarm woke me out of a dead sleep, even as I felt the resounding slams of bulkheads falling throughout the ship. I was out of my sleeper and at my emergency suit before the captain’s voice came over the intercom.
“Get suited up—we’re depressurizing! Hull breach in the lower storage bay, pressure doors are coming down!”
I wasted no time getting secure and on internal air supply, then hit my suit communications to the bridge. “I’m good. How are we doing?”
“We’ve lost air from the entire lower storage bay, but we’re tight now. Go check on Wraith. He may be having real trouble.”
Crap. I remembered he’d been in a decompression before, and had lost his voice in that accident. “I’m on the way. What happened?”
“No idea yet—go make sure Wraith’s okay and then get up here, I want you on scan.”
I rushed out and across to the engineer’s cabin and hit the emergency override. When the door opened, I slipped in to see him just dog the neck toggles of his own suit and helmet and also go air-secure. His eyes were less puffy now, but they had darker patches below them that wouldn’t fade until he’d get some serious rest, and they were wide open with fear at the moment. “You okay? Renault told you what’s going on?”
He gave me a shaky thumbs up, but I could also hear just how fast he was breathing.
I went over and checked his suit, then clicked my helmet against his so he could hear me when I spoke. “You’re all good and airtight, Wraith, and Renault says the leak’s contained by the pressure doors. We’re under control, so calm down.” I waited a moment while making eye contact. I saw him swallow, and saw him make an effort to slow his breath. “She wants me up on the bridge to cover scan; you coming or heading down to the bay?”
Wraith hesitated a moment, then pointed downward.
“I’ll let her know. Uh, stay safe.”
He moved close to me and grabbed my shoulder with one hand. Seen through our two faceplates, his expression looked grim but determined. Then he moved past me and out into the narrow corridor.
I went to the bridge, and because there was equal pressure on both sides of that door, it opened and let me in.
Captain Renault looked tired and a bit strung out, and I couldn’t recall ever having seen her that way before. “Get plugged into the scanners right away, Derek.”
I moved to my station and did. The unfolding of my senses, then … “Whoa.”
“What?”
“The lower cargo bay is empty of air, but I’m seeing something streaming out of there anyway.”
“Let me guess; the platinum?”
“Damn it!” It was, of course. “But how did it happen?” I got the computer to replay the sequence leading up to the hull breach, looking for anything on hyper-tracking that might have taken a poke at us.
“So what happened, Derek?”
I ran the sequence compressed and the last few minutes before in real time. “Nothing external, Captain. It blew out from the inside.”
She played her hands over the console by her chair and didn’t respond.
“Captain? Narcisse?”
She looked up at me. “What?”
“Uh, the cargo bay decompressed spontaneously. I mean, nothing hit us to hole the ship.”
“I heard you. I was reviewing the scan footage from the Errant Thought. Remember they had some airless sections?”
I nodded. “But the crew weren’t in them, and it was clear they didn’t die in vacuum.”
“Right, but we still don’t know what killed them. No platinum on board, right?”
“Nothing on scan, or when we went through the ship.”
“Exactly.”
“But what does that mean?”
Wraith stepped onto the bridge just as the captain shouted at me: “I have no goddamned idea, Derek! But I saw the same data stream you did, live, on the mined stuff which Wraith pulled in from the asteroid! It’s ninety nine percent pure platinum, right?”
I nodded.
“Well, what the hell’s the other one percent?!”
Her outburst—the first time I’d ever seen her lose her cool—left me feeling like I’d had a decompression accident myself, unable to breathe or speak for a moment. “I, I don’t know.”
She stopped stalking back and forth and crossed her arms as she looked at me. “Did you bother to analyze it?”
“No,” I admitted uneasily.
“Well, I did while you were sleeping! The computer can’t recognize what the hell that one percent is made of!”
I looked at Wraith and saw him nodding in agreement. My mouth went dry as we all looked at each other.
Then the engineer collapsed, and I realized he hadn’t been agreeing—he was seizing, or something worse.
Renault was at his side before I could move. “Wraith. Wraith!” The bucking became more violent and she looked at me, face white. “Flush atmo, now!”
“What?”
“Do it! We’re all suited, just do a complete flush
. Override the emergency doors, send it all out the cargo bay!”
I felt sluggish as I shut down safety protocols through the computer and opened the hatches. When I’d turned back around, I saw the captain had her arms around Wraith from behind, looped around his chest and she was dragging him backward off the bridge.
“Okay Captain, we’re venting.”
She looked up at me. “Now, get us turned around.”
“What heading?”
“Ceres Station. I’m going to get Wraith plugged into Medical, see if we can figure out what’s wrong.”
I heard the order, but my brain felt like it was stuck in gear and I just sat there wondering if something similar had happened on the Errant Though before its crew had been lost.
Then the bridge door opened, and Renault looked up from her burden and her gaze found mine. I’d never seen a look like that on her face in the years I’d known her. “Go already!” she shrieked, and left the bridge with Wraith.
Then I was alone with the Pat Hand and suddenly I could move. I programmed in the new course, set thrust to maximum, and plugged myself back into the scanners. As my sensorium expanded to that godlike feeling I wasn’t sure I’d ever get enough of, I could see the hole in the cargo bay clearly. It wasn’t venting atmosphere anymore, and I confirmed the ship was a total vacuum, but there was still something coming from the breach.
And even as the ship changed thrust vectors to turn us back in-system to match the course I’d programmed for Ceres, I saw the particulate platinum change its direction as it emerged, and then finally it stopped. “Computer, hyper-tracking—where’s that matter-stream headed, as if I didn’t know?”
It projected courses, even throughout the ship’s changing attitude, that were bang-on for that damned asteroid and its lode of ore.
I shivered suddenly, but a quick check of my suit told me my life support was steady in the green. “C’mon, Derek, pull yourself together. It’s all gone now.”
Dark Horizons Page 23
