The captain narrowed her eyes and looked at her flight crew. He could see greed battling with common sense, but he knew that if it weren’t at least possible, none of them would have even entertained the idea. Hell, they might as well have just pretended they never even found it, since it was the ship’s crew who found it and presented the data to his search team.
“The bottom line is yes,” the captain said.
“I knew it!” Yegor slapped his hands together and almost set himself spinning in zero gravity.
“But there is risk!” she added quickly. “Our estimate is we’d have no more than nine months before we’d reach the point that Dante would be unable to climb back out. We arrived at quite literally the nick of time. One mistake, one extra week’s delay…”
“I understand,” Yegor said, “and I’ll take the risk.”
“It’s not just you,” Ripley pointed out, “there are 59 people on this ship. They should get a say.”
“It’s not like we can leave and come back,” he said. “More weeks gone on the 9 months.”
“I agree, and I’m on board; I like the potential money.” He smiled hugely. “That’s my retirement fund floating out there. I have a couple sons and a future to think about, though.”
“Think about what a hundred million rubles would do for them!” Yegor crowed.
“I did, that’s why I agree personally. But the crew gets a say.”
“And if we’re not going back, to what point? We can’t leave them up here in a ship.”
“Actually, we can,” she disagreed. “Dante has three small craft. One is much bigger, intended as a transfer vehicle. It’s more than big enough to even give some spin. We can provision it, and, on the off chance someone comes along, they can wait by the stargate for a ride, since it doesn’t have hyperdrive.”
“Those could be people vital to the drilling,” he said darkly.
“That’s the price of this. We let those who elect not to go down have a way out, or my command crew refuses in mass.” Yegor looked around and all of them were nodding in agreement. He’d call it mutiny, except he wasn’t the captain.
“I guess I have little choice, then.”
In the end, only six people elected not to go. None of them were from jobs that didn’t have redundancy. However, one was the assistant geologist, and that hurt. Yegor didn’t show up to see them off as they loaded into the boat and headed for the stargate. He did, however, leave them with an official document that gave them each 5% of their promised pay as a severance package. The move didn’t cost him much, especially since he didn’t have to pay their full percentages now, and it made him look better in the eyes of the remaining crew. In fact, his reputation was now greatly enhanced! Dante began her descent toward a planetoid that would make them all incredibly rich.
5
Dante matched and landed on the planetoid four days later. Captain Ripley elected to take the descent slower than planned to avoid missing a rendezvous, which would have been catastrophic. The body itself was dense and orbiting the black hole at a rate of once every 97 days—a high velocity that had Dante push hard to match.
“We’re going to be pretty lean on reaction mass after we climb away,” the pilot Tosh said as he juggled numbers in a constantly evolving spreadsheet. Yegor sat on the bridge for a lot of the time and watched. Except for course corrections, it was the longest period they’d ever fired the ship’s ancient fusion torch main drive. Making things more nervous, halfway down, radio communications with the shuttle had grown distorted, and then failed all together. Dante’s transmitter seemed fine, which meant it was the shuttle, but by the time they were sure, it was far too late to turn around or do anything about it.
Landing was accomplished with very little fanfare. Because the planetoid had no atmosphere and no rotation (it was tidally locked with X-119), they sort of skimmed in, used their landing jets, and set down on the hellishly rocky landscape. It was just over 1,000 kilometers long, 850 kilometers wide, and shaped a bit like a potato. Its mass was enough to give it a surface gravity just about one-fifth of normal, which was impressive considering it was only an one-eighth the size of Earth’s moon!
“It’s one of the signs of F11,” Yegor explained as the ship’s crew set about securing the ship to the surface with grapples; “an unusually high density is involved in the formation of F11 pockets.” The crew was too busy to care, and the survey team was already in the hold, preparing to get to work.
Over the next week, they became acclimated to living on the surface. Yegor got tired of calling it the planetoid and exercised his right as the claim holder to dub it ‘Volchok,’ or ‘Spinner’ in English.
“Because it spins so fast,” he said, swirling his finger around in the air. The captain just shook her head, but the rest of the crew thought it was funny. Volchok it was, from that point on.
Yegor got on-the-job training in the use of a space suit and operating on the surface. These weren’t the common smaller suits he’d gotten a familiarity class with upon getting his space yacht. These were bulky with protective Kevlar, to make them safer in the industrial environment they were being used in, and were armored against radiation. The captain kept up an hourly report to the teams outside on what the radiation levels were; their baseline was 20 times higher than around Earth. The black hole was sucking in a lot of stray radiation, and the rads were coming toward the event horizon like a swirling galaxy, invisible and deadly. Volchok orbited through once every few hours.
He tried to stay out of the exploration crews’ way, and he largely succeeded. They were using a pair of hydrogen-powered mobile machines with core drill to move around and taste the ground. They had huge foam-filled tires and moved about one-quarter of a mile per hour. The plan was to run concentric core samples for a mile in every direction. If they didn’t find anything, they’d move the ship and try again. At the end of the first week, after breakfast, Yegor suited up and went out to check on the test shaft they’d started drilling the night before.
The surface was almost completely dark, although sometimes splashes of light would play across Volchok, a product of X-119’s light gathering. Dante had several powerful floodlights that could be aimed at the work area, but as they moved further away, the crews would need their own lights. Once a well was sunk, portable shelters would be erected next to the drill rig to avoid having to return to the ship. Yegor bounced across the rocky terrain, careful that he didn’t wedge a foot into a crevasse or slice himself on an exposed rock. As he approached the big, wheeled drill machine, he was excited for any results. He didn’t expect to find the entire crew standing around staring at the drill.
“What’s going on?” he transmitted to them as he approached, his suit lights adding to their circle.
“The sensor went off,” the exploration supervisor said.
“Must be a bad sensor,” the geologist said.
“What sensor?” Yegor asked.
“The F11 sensor.”
“I calibrated that myself,” he told them, “I have the F11 samples in my office. I checked all three sensors on pure, one percent, and one hundredth of one percent samples before I gave it to you.”
“Got to be an error,” the supervisor said, “we’ve only drilled 190 meters. The rock was a lot denser than we thought.”
“I have the third sensor,” Yegor said, and pulled it from a pocket. “Let me check.” The supervisor shrugged, and they made room for him to shuffle under the edge of the drill machine platform. The drill head was retracted and there was a large scattering of chewed rock. The hole wasn’t large, less than a centimeter, and nearly obscured by rubble. It wasn’t easy bending over the armored spacesuit. He had to stretch a bit to get the sensor probe close. Its alarm sounded in his helmet even before it was over the opening. Yegor sat the probe down and stood up so he could look at the readout of the slate fixed to the suit’s arm.
“F11 DETECTED---29% CONCENTRATION” Yegor stared at the data in dumfounded disbelief.
> “What does it say?” the supervisor asked. Yegor hit the link button on the display, sending the data to anyone else who was nearby.
“It’s lower than what we got from the drill,” one of the said.
“He just sat the damn thing on the ground,” the supervisor said.
“Holy shit,” another one hissed. “Holy fucking shit.”
“We found it,” Yegor said breathlessly. He leaned back his head in the helmet and howled like a wolf who’d just found a herd of sheep with nary a shepherd in sight.
They spent a week on the site, first triple-checking the data and then sinking the probe shaft a little further. Sensors read about 60% xenon gas, 30% F11, and another 10% miscellaneous trash. Some of the trash was troublesome, including a smattering of highly-radiated radon gas. According to the GalNet, that meant there was probably some rich radioactives in Volchok as well. If he only had more time, he’d crack the thing open and suck it dry! But time was something he didn’t have. The captain was increasingly nervous about not regaining contact with the shuttle, so they pressed forward.
The drill rig was set up in two weeks, and the test shaft was turned into a fully-capped drill head. The few cubic meters an hour of leaking F11 was money drifting off into space. A portable tank was set up to catch the tailings from the drill shaft and the main head cut deep into Volchok. Three days of drilling had the shaft puncture into a cavern, and the sensors went off the scale.
CHEMICAL ANALYSIS:
81% F11
11% XENON
5% ARGON
2% HYDROGEN
1% MISC
“Holy God,” Yegor said when the exploration lead provided him the data. “And the 81% is accurate?”
“Tested nine times,” he said with an almost painfully huge smile.
Yegor’s face hurt too. Anything above 50% was commercially viable. He’d brought equipment that could turn as low at 10% into 50%, as long as it wasn’t mixed with any other isotopes of Fluorine. Above 60% was a rich find, 75% was ultra-rich, and 79% was the highest-documented source in the galaxy. His output was richer than any other source in the galaxy. “We’re rich!” he said, and quickly told the entire crew.
With mining done, the drill crew quickly set up the extraction and processing plant. Even though it was exceptionally pure, it had to be processed. The hydrogen, for example, could be dangerous, as it tended to propagate into pumps and explode when you least expected. With tens of millions of credits’ worth of F11 moving around, you didn’t take that chance. The xenon and argon were less of an issue. Still, the purification plant was quickly turning out 89% pure F11, and the only contaminants were some noble gases in the parts per million range. It would fetch top dollar from any buyer in the galaxy.
Six days passed, and they were pumping at capacity from the well head. The pumps were extracting, purifying, and transferring to the storage tank in Dante 5,250 liters of purified F11 a day. At that rate, it would take 64 days to pump the tank full. Yegor wanted to be annoyed, but couldn’t. The first day he returned to Dante and the pumping station was running at peak efficiency, he stopped to watch the computer monitoring the tank’s fill rate. Liters flowed past at the rate of 3.6 per minute. Every minute, a stack of 22,000 credits was presented to him—he was a millionaire every hour! The wait wouldn’t be that bad.
6
“Tank has reached capacity,” the engineer reported over the radio. “Well head is secured, and guild beacon affixed per your protocol, Mr. Pestov.”
“Excellent,” he said from his office. “Put the plant in standby and return to the ship. Their original plan had been to pack everything up and take it back with them to reduce loses. Now, with the pumping done, he had other plans. Well pressure had only been reduced by 10%, which meant there were several million more liters of F11 down there. He was going to take this load back, secure a loan, and return to suck this play dry. What was a hundred thousand or so credits of mining equipment worth when stacked against billions of credits in F11!
They’d been on Volchok a grand total of 98 days, with the last 59 days spent pumping. The engineers managed to increase efficiency a bit and shaved a few days off. During that time, quality hadn’t wavered by so much as 1%, either. More importantly, they’d only used three months of Volchok’s remaining life. Dante’s pilot, Tosh, had studied the orbit of Volchok and determined it had 14 months remaining before nosing into X-119 for its final dive. That conclusion was what settled the plan in Yegor’s mind. They had to come back and finish the operation.
His orders to return set the ship’s crew into motion. Most were bored stiff, having gambled away fortunes they didn’t have yet to the smug mercs from Smerch who’d managed to drink almost every ounce of vodka on Dante, then began producing their own in a spare engineering space. When the order came, the crew jumped to, and the ship was ready to lift in just eight hours.
As soon as the last of the mining personnel were aboard and safe in their quarters, Yegor strapped himself into his seat on the bridge for the first time in three months, feeling like the cat who ate the proverbial canary.
“Captain Ripley,” he said to the woman, “please take us home.”
“With pleasure,” she replied. He had to admit, she’d warmed up to him quite a bit, though not as warm as he’d wished. It was probably just the credits. She missed her family back home, just like the rest of the crew. “Tosh, bring the engines online. Prepare to lift off,” she said ship-wide.
Dante roared to life again like an awakened dragon, shuddering and moaning as her lift engines pushed against Volchok’s nominal gravity. Once they were a few hundred meters up, the ship’s powerful fusion torch lit off, and they were pushed back in their seats as the ship accelerated away.
Leaving Volchok wasn’t a simple matter of climbing out. The ship had the thrust, at least on paper, but the power needed would likely kill the crew. X-119 had the ship, and it wouldn’t give it up lightly. Once clear of Volchok, Dante accelerated along the same orbit at a nominal 1.5Gs. Hour upon hour she gained speed, and began climbing away from the spectacular vista of the black hole. The ship shuddered and moaned around the 340-ton tank of F11 in her center.
“You can’t have me,” Captain Ripley said to the black hole as it began to fall behind them. “We’re going home.”
Two and a half days at 1.5Gs was tough on a crew that had just spent 3 months at 0.2Gs. Everyone took stimulant pills, and only a few got any rest. There were two injuries from falling and one broken leg. One of the drill crew had a minor embolism as well that the doctor treated with one of the new alien-manufactured nanite treatments. Without it, the brain hemorrhage would likely have proven fatal.
“We’re clearing X-119’s effect zone,” Tosh announced the second day.
“Throttle down to 1G,” Ripley ordered. “Begin searching for the shuttle.” According to their navigational data, they were on the opposite side of X-119 from the stargate when they finally climbed out of the monster’s gravity well, and they couldn’t even see the stargate until they’d orbited quite a ways around the black hole. The visual distortion of the singularity played hell with their sensors. For another day, they moved outward and began slowing to match orbits with the stargate as it slowly became more recognizable on the ship’s sensors.
“I have radio traffic,” Beaverton announced. He pushed the headset against his ear. “It’s still pretty distorted, but it’s the shuttle’s ID.”
“I thought their radio was out,” Ripley said.
Beaverton shrugged. “It’s them alright.” He listened for a few minutes as they orbited, then his face took on a confused look. “Wait,” he said, working the computer controls of the radio, “wait one…” Everyone on the bridge watched intensely. “It’s not a comms call; it’s a mayday.”
“Mayday?” the captain asked. “For what?”
“I don’t know; it’s automated.”
“Tosh, ETA?”
“About five hours,” he said.
“C
an we get there any faster?”
“No,” he said, “fuel is already critical.”
“Damn it,” she said. A few hours later, the sensor operator was able to pick out the shuttle on her optical telescope. It was floating 20 kilometers from the silent circle of the stargate. It looked lifeless except for the single flashing marker light. “Looks fine,” she said.
“My sensors aren’t the best, but I have a power reading, albeit a small one.” The blocky shape of the shuttle grew closer by the hour. Yegor arrived when it was an hour away, having listened most of the time in his stateroom. He was still sore from the two-day climb away from X-119, like many of the ship’s complement.
“What do you think is wrong?” he asked Ripley as he strapped in. They were in free fall, approaching at a few hundred meters per second.
“No idea,” she said, her face etched in worry. “They don’t respond to radio traffic, or a comms laser.”
“Maybe pirates,” Tosh suggested.
“They would have taken the whole shuttle,” Ripley said. Many on the bridge nodded.
The time ticked down and then Dante burned her maneuvering thrusters to come in next to the quiet shuttle. The two ships sat just 100 meters apart.
“Now what?” Yegor asked.
“Now we see if anything still works over there,” Ripley said. “Tosh, initiate remote docking.”
“Aye, aye, Captain,” he said and activated the computer controls. Nothing happened for a second as Dante’s flight computer transmitted to its shuttle. Then suddenly the shuttle’s stubby wing lights came on and its attitude control jets fired.
“Thank God,” Ripley said as the shuttle spun around and began backing toward the shuttle.
“That initiated computer linkage,” Beaverton said from comms.
The Good, the Bad, and the Merc: Even More Stories from the Four Horsemen Universe (The Revelations Cycle Book 8) Page 19
