The Salvagers

by John Michael Godier

  It had been scarcely an hour, and the show had already begun. The speed and awesome power of the collision had thrown small fragments like bullets into the upper atmosphere of the planet, well ahead of the main debris field. They looked like supersonic fireflies as they burned up. I wondered whether some of them might have been bricks of gold, but I realized their intensity was too low.

  It didn't seem as though we were falling. Velocity is a difficult thing to gauge in space. You can't visually determine it due to the incomprehensibly huge size of the planet below you. Even though we were gaining speed at a mindboggling rate, it seemed more as though we were timeless, suspended forever above mighty Saturn. I held my wife as tightly as our moon suits would allow. We were in such proximity that I no longer could discern Saturn’s curvature. It had become a horizontal straight line, the planet stretching infinitely as a yellow plain below us. I wondered whether we had broken a record for the closest human approach to Saturn. We would one way or another as we fell further, but I figured that we had already accomplished it. I didn't tell Janet. We weren't saying anything at all but just trying to enjoy each other's presence in our last hours before we plunged to our deaths.

  There were worse ways to go, I thought. It would be instantaneous when the friction burned our suits open and vaporized us. The loss of air would be so fast that death would be painless.

  I also didn't try to contact the Amaranth Sun. They were in high orbit, as I had ordered, far out of the communications range of our space suits. Those were designed to talk to people hundreds of feet away, not hundreds of miles, and the interference from Saturn's natural radio emissions shortened our range even more. I did look for my ship, thinking it might appear as a dim moving star across the backdrop of the heavens and Saturn's rings, but I couldn't see it. For all I knew it was following its orbit on other side of the planet.

  Even if the Amaranth Sun could have reached us in time, we were so close to Saturn that escaping the giant planet's gravity was no longer possible with the engines my ship had. It was best, I reasoned, to spare my crew the hours of agony knowing we were going to die no matter what they tried. I hoped they would simply conclude that we had died instantly in the collision.

  I intended to use my remaining time to reflect on all that had happened to me since finding the treasure ship. I believed, in some way, that I had saved Earth's future from something so malevolent that it took two civilizations to defeat. Or was it two? If I had seen dark-matter twins of the sun and Saturn, was there perhaps a dark-matter equivalent of me? Had I really seen a copy or counterpart of myself in that vision, or was I misled? What was the anomaly? Who was the dark power that controlled it? I'll never know the answers to those questions, but I could see the anomaly, even then, trying to form in the wreckage.

  Flashes of blue flickered across the entire debris field, but the crystalline matter was no longer concentrated enough to allow the anomaly to manifest itself fully. I'm sure Janet would have said they were just loose electrical wires and batteries discharging, but I knew they were something else. The distinct color and the rise and fall of their intensity was all too familiar. It was trying tenaciously to form itself and find some way to avert its own destruction.

  "We're getting closer," Janet said, breaking the silence.

  "And moving faster, I think. The planet is pulling us in."

  "I never thought I'd die while falling into Saturn and holding onto you, Cam."

  "I'm glad you're not alone."

  "You, me and the Dark Matter Beings," she said. Her words triggered a thought.

  "I guess you were right. I wasn't the catalyst. I might not have even been special," I said, holding her thickly gloved hand. "I was just a pawn at the right place at the right time to interact with them." The angle of the sun was making the debris field glint gold, the bricks reflecting the light as we were swept along with them.

  "Why do you say that?" she asked. "That anomaly, whoever or whatever it was, could have taken you at any time. The aliens must have prevented it."

  "I suppose. Perhaps they knew what I would do later. Maybe they see time from a different perspective. I didn't tell you, but they contacted me the second time I stepped onto the Cape Hatteras. Sanjay as well."

  "What did they say?"

  "They wanted us to leave. I guess that, if the ship had sat out there frozen with the anomaly contained in the ice, nothing ever would have happened. In the end my greed for the gold unleashed it."

  "You might be greedy, but you aren't those military men. You never would have tried to use the anomaly as a weapon. You'd have destroyed it, one way or another. Nelson would have too, but he never made it to Jupiter. Maybe they protected and used only those people who they knew had good intentions and would overcome their greed."

  "And those who didn't died in the anomaly. It killed to ensure that it would be successful in eventually getting to Earth."

  "But if you weren't the catalyst that allowed it to open, what was?"

  "I think I know. It was the gold."

  "The gold?"

  "The concentrated and dense mass of all that gold. When I was in the laboratory on Titan, I was wearing the pendant you gave me. That's what set the crystals off, not me. Moving the Hyperion closer brought the gold to the crystals, intensifying the anomaly's power and allowing it to appear. The gold was on the ship with the crystals when Nelson was manipulated. It was on the Hyperion, stalled next to the Cape Hatteras, when the Victorious was destroyed. There was gold still on the derelict when the scientists were marooned. When those ships collided, the anomaly closed, the crystals shattered below the critical mass, and the gold was dispersed, changing its collective mass."

  "Still, there were plenty of things with mass that the crystals didn't react to."

  "But the crystals were native to Walton's Rock, and so was the gold. The gold must have been joined in a hybrid molecule with dark matter as well, and when they refined the gold they made it purer and denser, and it became enough to create the anomaly. You yourself saw irregularities in the weight of the gold. It wasn't an error. It really did have properties different from those of normal gold. Maybe Walton's Rock was the only place in the solar system where those two things were present in abundance. The Dark Matter Beings suggested that the asteroid wasn't natural. Maybe it was manipulated from somewhere else. Maybe whoever controlled the anomaly knew that one day man's hunger for that gold would bring us to Walton’s Rock and that we would refine it to a pure state."

  Meteors of debris were plunging more often into the planet's atmosphere. I almost thought I could see the haze of the tenuous outer atmosphere of the planet starting to collect around us. I closed my eyes and squeezed Janet's gloved hand. It wouldn't be long now.

  "I love you, Captain Janet," I said.

  "That's Doctor Hunter, and I love you too, Cam." She buried her helmet into my chest as our comm link was finally overwhelmed by proximity to Saturn and it's natural radio emissions.

  The flashing grew more intense. I closed my eyes. Larger meteors were falling now, signaling that the front edge of the main debris field was contacting Saturn's upper atmosphere. I tried to contain my trembling as best I could, not wanting Janet to feel it. The flashing grew brighter but not as fast as it should have.

  I realized that a rhythm had formed, an unnatural one. It was a Morse rhythm.

  When I opened my eyes to see what it was, I spotted something more beautiful than the wreck of the Cape Hatteras on the day I discovered it . . . and maddening at the same time because of its crew’s flagrant disregard of danger. The Amaranth Sun was charging our way at hundreds of feet per second.

  It looked determined and somehow brave and powerful, in the way a mouse charging a lion would seem. Her engines and attitude-adjustment thrusters fired in thousands of white blasts in all directions at the mathematical instruction of a computer struggling to counter the gravitational pull of Saturn. As the Amaranth Sun drew toward us, I could see its momentum slowing from the effec
ts of drag in the upper reaches of the planet’s atmosphere.

  As the ship came closer, all I could focus on was Stacey's and Kurt’s faces peering with looks of intense worry through the bridge windows. The rhythmic flashes were coming from the floodlights on the ship’s bow, the same ones that had first illuminated the Cape Hatteras. They were sending a simple sentence over and over: "Get in!"

  I shook Janet, who hadn't yet opened her eyes to see them. There is no sound in space, so even the explosion of a star is utterly silent, much less the frantic approach of a ship. I felt her tense even through the moon suit. It was the excitement of someone getting the best news of her life. I waved as the Amaranth Sun braked and slid its port side toward us. The airlock yawned open and approached at alarming speed.

  There wasn't time to climb into it. The airlock simply captured us. The ship rotated around again in the direction of its momentum and did something for which I knew it was not designed. It jolted forward in an acceleration so impossibly powerful that I worried we'd be crushed by inertia against the side of the now closed and filling airlock. And there we stayed glued for twenty minutes before the pressure finally let up abruptly.

  "What the hell did you do?" I asked, climbing out of the inner airlock door.

  "Remember that rocket engine from the NASA probe we had strapped to the back? I welded it on, and we fired it!" Neil said.

  "What? Do you have any idea how dangerous that engine is? If it had exploded, it would have killed you or left you drifting into Saturn too!"

  "It's not dangerous anymore. It's out of fuel."

  "Well, do we have the velocity we need to escape Saturn?"

  "Yeah, and then some," Stacey said, as she shot down the hall.

  "You could have been killed! I said to stay in high orbit!"

  "We mutinied. All three of us agreed. We overrode your orders."

  I smiled and gave Stacey a huge hug while noticing out the rear window of engineering that the bulk of the wreckage was now falling into Saturn, along with the crushed hulk of the Cape Hatteras. We moved closer to watch.

  "Those are the gold bars," I said. "The haul is burning up."

  It was strangely beautiful to watch my fortune burn away. I'd have nothing when it was all over. When the spectacle started to subside, I turned to my son.

  "Mutinied," I said.

  "Yeah, I finally agreed with Stacey on something."

  "My own son mutinied."

  "Don't I get a hug for mutiny too?"

  "Yeah," I said, and hugged him, "but I have news."

  "What?"

  "We've got a new permanent crew member."

  "Huh?"

  "Your mother! We're back together."

  He looked surprised and confused but not unhappy. "Well, that's great. How long will she be with us? Surely she has obligations back on Earth, teaching at the university and all."

  "Well, I don't see us returning to Earth any time soon, at least until Ed Iron cools down."

  "But. . . ," he said. It had begun to dawn on him what the implications of having his mother as a crew member might be.

  "And, you know, she does have an advanced degree in engineering, and you don't. But there are plenty of things to do around here. The ship could certainly use a good cleaning."

  "But. . . ."

  "Don't worry, son," said Janet. "It'll only be a year or two, five at most."

  Chapter 33 Day 332

  "Office of Rear Admiral Jonah T. Carlin. Admiralty Administration Complex, Union of North American Governments, Montreal, Province of Verbec. February 26, 2258. Eyes only, HALCYON clearance required. To the Director of UNAG Intelligence, Dr. Augustin Sato, Los Angeles, Province of Calorwa. The sensitive nature of the findings of Halcyon necessitates the creation of a cover story. A gold-mining mission to the asteroid 974-Bernhard is to be promoted to the public as a methodology for reducing the Union's debt, taking advantage of the erstwhile public promotion of the asteroid by the late Dr. Walton. At the preplanned early completion of the mining mission, your operative, Salus, is to collect the crystalline material by whatever means he has at hand. We believe that a matter-dark matter weapon would give the UNAG a significant advantage in the marginalization of the Asian-African and Eurorussian unions."

  I would have to explain it all to Ed Iron in the morning. There wasn't any scenario I could think of in which things would turn out alright. Losing the derelict was one thing, but losing the gold was a different matter altogether. It was overwhelmingly unlikely that we'd be free to return to Earth any time soon—possibly for the rest of our lives. I expected that we'd have to make a run for it and hide out at Neptune and fend for ourselves. Maybe we could haul freight pods for the Triton mafia.

  We all were looking for some diversion, anything to get our minds off the coming day. I had one idea that I knew would work. It was the one connection with our home planet that I could tie up neatly: the marriage of Kurt and Stacey.

  I was hesitant at first because our immediate setting seemed somehow inappropriate. Kurt and Stacey assured me that getting married on the Amaranth Sun was a better idea than Florida anyway, but I thought they deserved something nicer.

  I therefore suggested a wedding on one of the small deserted moons that circled Uranus. We'd be passing by that system anyway, and hardly anyone ever visits them. I also had heard they were uniquely beautiful—low-gravity spheres bathed in the planet's blue-green light. It would certainly be more romantic than the bridge. Eventually I was overruled, however, when Neil and Janet joined Kurt and Stacey in favor of the Amaranth Sun, so I gave in and dutifully donned a uniform.

  Now, I hate uniforms. I'm the kind of person who's comfortable dressing in utilitarian jump suits and t-shirts. I have little interest in what amounts to silly costumes, especially after my dealings with the captain of the Portsmouth. I only own one set of formal attire, and I couldn't remember using it since I first tried it on when I bought it twenty years earlier. It was sickeningly classical—a white jacket complete with epaulets, a peaked cap with the merchant spacefarer's insignia in gold, and a navy blue shirt and tie. It even had my name embroidered on the jacket. It was just something to take a few pictures in and then toss in a closet after I made the rank of merchant captain.

  Kurt and Stacey hadn't expected me to put it on; in fact, they didn't know I owned a uniform. After my Uranus idea was shot down, however, I figured that I had to surprise them. They undoubtedly were expecting me to show up in a jumpsuit and get the ceremony over with as fast as I could. I went to the bridge looking like the skipper of a lunar tourist cruiser. The get-up couldn't have been cheesier. I could just as well have been dressed to inform the passengers that the comedian's performance in the lounge had been canceled and that the dinner buffet would be open for an extra hour in compensation.

  My attire wasn't lost on Neil and Janet. They saw me coming before the lovebirds did and snapped to attention in zero-G before flanking me as I passed through the door. I didn't know either of them could do that, its being something that takes a little practice, but they pulled it off brilliantly. Our grand entrance caused Stacey to have a rare meltdown. Tears flowing and holding Kurt's hand tightly, she seemed overwhelmed.

  "Dearly beloved," I said, "we are gathered here today in the presence of these witnesses. . . ." I had memorized the whole thing beforehand to keep my mind off Ed Iron. Everything was going perfectly, if you don't count Neil's snort when Stacey came in wearing a chef's bib from the galley complete with a blood stain—it was the only thing we had that could serve as a wedding dress other than our usual blue jump suits. The wedding rings were simple plastic seals taken out during the Amaranth Sun's refit. They would be proxies until Kurt and Stacey could buy real ones at a colony.

  I'd never performed a wedding before, but I muddled through just fine. After I pronounced them man and wife, they kissed. We then celebrated before they retired to the honeymoon suite, which was their normal cabin decorated with some cans Neil had hung on the door and where h
e had written "Just Married" in engine grease.

  I didn't sleep a wink that night, and not because of the newlyweds active in the cabin next to mine. I was used to those sorts of sounds already, though Janet tossed and turned so much that I had to tire her out by acting like a new husband myself. I didn't sleep because of the prospect of communicating with Ed Iron the next day. If discovering the Cape Hatteras had been my greatest moment, the aftermath was going to be my worst.

  I tried to reduce the expected fallout with my usual written report to Ed as a prelude to speaking directly. However, my experience had been so extraordinary that I knew my usual method of downplaying the bad and focusing on the good wasn't going to work. I just had to be honest and matter of fact. Looking the report over, I recognized that it was all bad news for him: the gold was gone, the relic was gone, the ship he had bought was gone, and he now had a bunch of scientists stranded on Titan for whom he'd need to arrange transport home.

  I expected nothing less than a tirade followed by endless messages from a team of lawyers ensuring that I would never make a living again. My house in Arizona would be sold, and I would be worse off than ever before. I spent much of the rest of the night planning the particulars of our escape to the outer solar system.

  At 7:00 a.m. sharp came the incoming message ping. "We've got two ways to get past this, Cam," he said. "I'm satisfied with your story. It meshes with what everyone else has said. And I won't lie: I'm absolutely amazed at the quantum-pad recordings you sent. Our first communication with an alien species or something of the sort! Who'd have thought they'd do it through dreams? My people think your brain was manipulated on the subatomic level, imagine the power they must possess to control energy at such small scales and change how neurons behave.”

  “Yours is a story worth money,” he continued, “but not enough. Let's not avoid the basics. It won't cover the money I’ve lost. I'm sure you understand that," Ed said with artificial calmness.

  I was so nervous that I said "I do" in violation of the rule in long-distance space communication that one person talks all at once before the other person replies. That kind of thing was usually second nature to me, but I'd forgotten it entirely. Thankfully he couldn't hear me because the microphone was turned off.