The Salvagers (4 page)

Chapter 5      Spin

             
I'd never heard of an intentional ramming in space, but if Pace believed his bow could take it, there wasn't much I could do to stop him. The close positions of my two ships made it impossible to tell which one he was aiming for. My gut feeling told me he was after the prize. If you embed your bow into a derelict ship, that's as good a way as any to make it yours. Alternatively, the whole thing might have been a game of chicken to drive us away from the
Cape Hatteras
. We had no way to know until it was impossible to escape.

             
What we did know was that the margin for error was zero. If he was aiming for the
Amaranth Sun,
a light bump would do fatal damage. Our hull would breach, and we'd end up just like the
Cape Hatteras
and her crew. I didn't think Pace would do it, but if he were after us, we could either abandon the derelict and punch the engines or die. Either way Finley would retire rich in the lawless outer solar system.

             
We had to act fast.

             
"Stacey, spin the
Hatteras
!" I yelled. Without hesitation she fired the pneumatic thrusters. We saw the white sprays shoot from them, but the ship was still motionless. If they had worked at all, they spun it so little that we couldn't see the rotation.

              "What the hell happened?" I asked frantically.

             
"They fired, but it looks like they all went off at once."

             
"At once?"

             
"They're in stabilization mode. The computer didn't understand why we would want to spin it again, so it corrected the order, believing it was getting faulty information. Damned artificial intelligence. Cam, we've got no reserves left."

             
"Nice work, Stacey! We've got to grapple," Neil exclaimed. "Dad, bring us around, and I'll go out and attach the lines to the stern of the
Cape
Hatteras.
"

             
That was a very dangerous idea, and I wasn't certain we had time for it. If Neil was out there when Pace’s ship closed in, we could lose him in several different ways, not the least of which was vaporization by Finley's engine wash.

             
"Do it," I ordered half-heartedly.

             
I followed him to the airlock, despite knowing that he didn't want me involved. He was always independent, wanting to save the day by himself and take the credit for it.

             
"Sure you want to do this?" I asked, placing my hand on his shoulder and hoping fruitlessly that he would reconsider. "I'd rather have a son than a treasure ship."

             
"I can do it. I've suited up and worked in space a thousand times. You said yourself that I've got more experience than you had at my age. And you
know
I'm fast," Neil said. His confidence was well founded but did little to ease my worries.

             
Neil suited up and climbed into the airlock. I watched as the atmosphere drained off and the outer door rotated open. He pushed himself out, spun around, and took up the ends of two steel mooring cables. I can't say I liked the idea of losing them. It's a pain to dock a ship without lines to draw it in. The astronauts of old always seemed to manage it, but it's much safer to use a winch.

             
Neil fired his suit thrusters and headed for the
Cape Hatteras
. I shot to the bridge, which was the only place that had a starboard porthole where I could see him. I probably shouldn't have watched at all. Nothing up to that point had been so intense on my nerves.

             
He started by covering the distance between the two ships much faster than I thought he should have. One of the lines he was carrying flailed about, for a moment appearing as though it might foul and whiplash him off into space. He was lucky it didn't. He fired his suit's thrusters just in time to make soft contact near the stern of the derelict.

             
I've never seen anyone move that fast in a moon suit with its massive thruster array attached. Space may be a weightless environment, but everything still has inertia and bulk, and that makes movement far from effortless. And you get weak in space. Despite the periodic injections of nanotechnological microrobots that maintained us on the cellular level, time in the gravity centrifuges was still required. Even with all of that, and regular exercise, you
will
get weaker working in space no matter what you do. As the old saying went, "The strongest man in space was nothing in a bar fight on Earth." Somehow Neil wasn't showing it. He got the first line connected in record time and then scrambled to the side of the
Cape Hatteras
to connect the second.

             
Once the job was finished, the idea was to punch the engines hard, tightening the shorter cable on the stern and pulling the derelict along, giving it some speed. Then we would sever it, in turn tightening the second line and imparting a fast spin. We hadn't had time to work out the physics of it all, so we left it to providence that we wouldn't cause the derelict to tumble on multiple axes. If the whole process went well, both the prize and the
Amaranth Sun
would be well off in two slightly different directions, moving faster than Finley Pace’s big unwieldy ship could follow. If it worked, the first thing I planned to do was to hang a portrait of Sir Isaac Newton on the bulkhead and sacrifice an apple to it. Then we'd rendezvous with the
Cape Hatteras
and radio a course correction to our salvor.

             
"Got it!" Neil exclaimed. "Coming back over." He hit his thrusters so hard that he brushed past the airlock door, smacking squarely into the exposed mechanisms on the far wall and tearing a hole in his suit.

             
"Close it! Close it! I've got a leak!" he yelled. I slammed the button to start the compression cycle, and it became a helpless waiting game. There was no way to know how fast or slow the leak was. It takes less than 30 seconds for the pressure to come up to one atmosphere, but that's an eternity when your suit is losing air. It's a terrible way to go, and it doesn't work as you might think it does. You exhale forcefully, but at the same time you feel your lungs stretching like balloons as the air you do have expands. You panic as your brain senses your inability to take in enough oxygen. The feeling hits you in the chest, a fear unlike anything else. Losing air also means losing heat and moisture, leaving you feeling incredibly cold and terrified, your skin drying painfully fast, and you're struck with stinging pain as the blood vessels in your eyes burst and your lungs are destroyed by barotrauma. Then you pass out.

             
Twenty-five seconds. I could see Neil struggling. I looked for anything I could do to speed up the process. Finding a wrench stowed on the wall next to the door, I grabbed it and banged on the glass of the window. It was unbreakable.

             
Fifteen seconds left. "Jesus, he's passing out," I yelled, but the others couldn't leave the bridge. I banged harder with as much strength as I could muster. I saw his face pressed against the glass of his helmet. Ten seconds. He was turning blue. Ice was forming in his eyebrows as his body was robbed of moisture. Five seconds. He had stopped moving. Then came the green light. I spun the door open as fast as I could while yelling to Stacey to begin the maneuver.

             
I felt the ship burst forward and then stop a moment later as the first cable went taut. I opened the inner airlock door and pulled off Neil's helmet. He was breathing. I felt relieved, but that didn't mean he was uninjured. His color began to return. It hadn't been too late. He regained consciousness, coughing hard and opening his eyes and blinking frenetically to wet them.

             
"Are we moving?" he asked, wheezing.

             
"Yes!" I exclaimed as I pushed myself through the door frame, pulled a 90-degree spin, and shot to the the bridge. The
Amaranth Sun
was barely moving.

             
"Half a kilometer per hour," Stacey said as I careened through the doorway.

             
"Full thrust?"

             
"As much as it can give," she said with some disappointment. I guess she expected the
Amaranth Sun
to save the day, but the laws of physics are immutable. But it
was
moving, if only slightly. I looked down the hall to check on my son. I could see him, still wearing half his moon suit, working in the engine room. I remembered the jury-rigged wire.

             
"Neil! Is it holding?" I asked.

             
"For now, but if it fails, we'll be dead in the water," he said, not sounding well at all after what he'd just been through.

             
"Three kilometers per hour and increasing exponentially," Stacey reported.

             
Most captains get sentimental over their ships. They anthropomorphize them, pet them. Old Will McInerny used to brew an extra cup of coffee each morning and pour it into the recycler just to give his ship that extra kick. That's not me.

             
"Come on, you bastard!" was the most endearing thing I could come up with as I kicked a bulkhead.

             
"Ten kilometers per hour," Stacey said.

             
"I smell burning back here!" Neil relayed. I hoped he was making it up for effect.

             
"Twenty."

             
"Fifty." We had less than two minutes left before Pace would be on us..

             
"A hundred"........"Two hundred"......... "Five hundred"...... "A thousand."

             
"Sling it!" I yelled.

             
Stacey cut the first line. We felt a jolt as the second line went taut, then a major lurch as the
Amaranth Sun
spun on its own, the final line being cut by the computer at just the right moment. The maneuver had worked. I saw the
Cape Hatteras
rotating wildly as we spun around. Stacey fired the hydrazine thrusters, righting the
Amaranth Sun
just in time for us to see Finley's salvor pass between our ships. We were receding from each other at thousands of kilometers per hour. It would take him days to stop and calculate our new trajectories. We'd be long gone by the time he did any of that, and catching up would cost him a lot of fuel. Given that he'd been out there for a while already, I figured he was probably running low. And, even if he did overtake us, he'd never stop the
Cape Hatteras
from spinning. We had won.

             
I watched Pace through the telescope for several days thereafter. He seemed to give up and content himself by heading onward to Jupiter. I never did find out which ship he was aiming for.

             
We updated Ed Iron and the
Hyperion
about what had happened. Four days later we caught up with the
Cape Hatteras
, but there was little else we could do. It was tumbling so fast that its details were a blur. Stacey had no sooner completed the braking maneuvers to bring us alongside than we lost power. Everything went black.

Chapter 6     Dead in Space

             
Four and a half months in space with nothing to do. We had main engines but no navigation computer, no lighting other than the glow of a few critical instrument panels, and just enough power shunted around the short to support basic systems like air recycling. It was the deep-space equivalent of camping out.

             
When too much current passed through the wire, the copper vaporized. The whole line was gone, and we had nothing left to replace it. We even tried to raid the NASA probe but found it to be full of useless fiber-optic cable and inaccessible traces on circuit boards.

             
The
Cape Hatteras
sat spinning about a kilometer off our port bow. It had shed our steel scaffolding and the pneumatic thrusters. Its center was wrapped like a mummy in our cut mooring lines, but otherwise it seemed intact. I tried to radio the
Hyperion
again without success. Our limited power, we surmised, wasn't producing enough of a signal.

             
We simply had to wait for reinforcements. The real salvage would begin when the
Hyperion
arrived. It was a 300-foot vessel constructed just two years earlier and it was the most advanced and capable salvor yet built. I was delighted to have that ship. It certainly cost enough to rent, from what I understood.

             
Ed Iron wanted us to have the best, but he also wanted regular communications. I knew I would get an earful when we regained contact, but I couldn't have controlled what had happened. In a certain way the lack of communications gave me an advantage: when I did eventually establish contact, my account of the claim jump would make for one hell of a surprise read for him. I started writing it on a quantum pad for lack of anything else to do.

             
I don't like using quantum pads. There's something very invasive about setting a sensor by your head and letting it scan your thoughts. Everyone uses them, and it's an old technology, but the idea of thinking a picture and having it appear on a machine seems disturbing and voyeuristic. It's also inaccurate. The human brain doesn't remember sufficient detail to make a decent digital image. However, I didn't have a working computer for dictation, and the quantum pads had inexhaustible batteries.

             
Unfortunately the endeavor didn't take up
enough
time. There were days when we had nothing else to do except chat. The
Amaranth Sun
is a tiny ship with a small crew who are around each other all hours of the day. That's not so bad when you have work to do, but when you don't the nerves fray easily.

             
Neil spent weeks recovering from his decompression injuries, mostly resting in his cabin or doing reduced duty in engineering. But once he felt okay, he and Stacey were at each other's throats. I tried to diffuse things by ordering exercise regimens because the centrifuge pods were offline, but I also hoped the physical activity would blow off steam.

             
It wasn't enough. By the end of those months we weren’t getting along, and I had taken to spending most of my time in my cabin. I even cleaned it, in total darkness, just to see how well I could do, although I wouldn't know until the lights came back on. Neil kept to himself in engineering as much as he could. Stacey and Kurt stayed on the bridge and squabbled, which sometimes made for entertaining listening.

             
When not on a mission, they lived together on the east coast of Florida. Treasure-hunting was the glue that bound them together. When at home, they'd go beach-combing and look for coins that washed up from the old Spanish wrecks that lay offshore. A few months before finding the derelict they had asked me to marry them the next time we were on Earth. I am a ship's captain, after all, and I was looking forward to performing the ceremony, but at times they argued so vehemently that I figured their marriage would go as badly as mine had.

             
When the
Hyperion
and its crew finally arrived, we didn't see them. There's a small window in engineering that lets you look out from the ship’s stern, but no one was regularly checking it. The radio receiver was turned off to conserve power, so when they appeared it was a complete surprise and a very scary sight. The salvor was a huge cylinder that looked just like Finley Pace's ship. We stopped breathing until we saw the bright flashing of Morse greetings.

             
Our first order of business was to dock the ships together and repair the
Amaranth Sun
. Within hours they had an airtight corridor running between us. I opened the hatch to see an old friend of sorts. The scowling face before me was that of my ex-wife.

             
"Where's my son?" she asked.

             
I hadn't been told that she would be part of the mission. I didn't dislike her—in fact, we were on amicable enough terms—but it was still a shock to see her. Kurt and Stacey had always wondered why my marriage failed. I told them that the answer was simple: I was one of those self-absorbed people who just could not sustain a relationship, even with the perfect woman—which Janet was not.

             
"He's in engineering, and he's fine. Did you come out here because you were worried?" I asked

             
"No, I came out here because I’m eminently qualified and the pay is unbeatable."

             
"I know you better than that."

             
"No, you don't! Ed Iron figured that since we knew each other I'd be trustworthy, even if there was personal friction. There won't be. Now point me to my son."

             
Clearly she wasn't in the mood for talking, so I directed Janet to Neil. I didn't believe her story. She was never concerned with making large amounts of money. While there's no question that she's a fine engineer, having graduated top of her class at the University of Copernicus Crater, I knew that her presence had more to do with Neil than it did with my salvage project.

             
I followed her back to engineering. Neil had the look on his face of someone who wasn't quite sure whether to be happy or very scared. He could get away with his youthful shenanigans with me, but he wouldn't get far with her.

             
"Give your mother a kiss," Janet said, "and a hug. How are you, baby? Is everything okay?"

             
"I'm fine, Mom. Don't worry about me," Neil said.

             
"You haven't been doing anything dangerous?" she asked him, darting a look at me with virtual lasers shooting from her pupils.

             
"No. Safety first is the golden rule!"

             
He sounded like a ten-year-old. I used to say the same kinds of things to placate her.

             
"Well," she said, turning in my direction. "I guess we need to fix this
ship
of yours. Where did you buy this bucket, a used-vehicle dealership on Mercury?"

             
She opened a panel against the back wall. I didn't think it had anything to do with the failed wire.

             
"There's nothing in here but substandard trash. No wonder you're floating around dead in space. Oh come on," she said, "look at this quanzistor," yanking it out with uncomfortable force. "Don't you ever do maintenance on this ship?"

             
"Yes, I'll have you know it went through a complete refit just. . . ."

             
"Refit or not, this shouldn't be in here. These things have dates on them, and this one expired two years ago. I can just imagine what the food in your galley is like."

             
"It's up to date, I swear!"

             
"Feeding my son dried kelp from fifteen years ago. You're the cheapest person I know."

             
"I am not cheap!"

             
"You don't think you are, but I'll bet your supplier is altering dates. You're single-minded. It's always salvage, salvage, salvage. Just cursory thoughts about anything else."

             
"I'm not that bad!"

             
"Well, we did find those old steaks," Neil said.

             
"Thanks, Neil! Stop sucking up to your mother!"

             
"I am not sucking up. Those steaks were a year past their date! They were awful. They had to have been from a milk cow or something."

             
I didn't want to admit anything in front of Janet. Yes, I had bought them on Mercury. And, yes, I had gotten a great deal on them. And, yes, I had bought forty cases of them at a bulk price. And, yes, they probably were from dairy cows. But Neil could have given me a little slack.

             
"I should tell her about your two feuding female friends on Mars," I said.

             
"Father, you know I don't like girls yet."

             
I rolled my eyes.

             
"And it was three," Neil added.

             
"Of course he doesn't like girls! Both of you, stop it!" Janet commanded. "Cam, you're wrong, and my little angel is right. Now let's get to fixing this bucket."

             
"I’ve missed you," I mumbled sarcastically.

             
She wasted no time in summoning the engineering team from the
Hyperion
. They had my ship up and running in two hours. Their efficiency was incredible, and it was great to see the lights on again. There were even spacewalkers installing new mooring lines to replace the ones we lost. I went to explore the
Hyperion
while they finished.

             
It was a gorgeous ship, full of enormous interior spaces. When you're stuck on a tiny craft the size of a three-bedroom house, you get used to small spaces. The
Hyperion
was like a palace, its spaciousness seeming almost too much. It had two rotating sections with gravity and a gymnasium instead of a kitchen/gym/dining-room combo like what we had on my ship, along with a large cargo hold and even a recreational room with gravity. The people onboard could sit around on couches, have snacks and watch the latest holovies sent from Earth. On the
Amaranth Sun
we had to hover on the bridge and watch 400-year-old classics on a two-inch instrument display.

             
"Jealous?" Captain David Keating asked.

             
"Yeah, you've got more than one bathroom," I said.

             
"Three, and each bedroom has a unisex urination facility," he replied.

             
"Lovely. A suction cup at 4:00 a.m. Isn't technology wonderful." He chuckled.

             
I didn't know David personally, but we seemed to be starting on a good footing, or so I thought.

             
"Captain Hunter, on a more serious note, it's both a pleasure to meet you and a joy to be a part of this salvage. I don't have to say that the
Cape Hatteras
is legendary."

             
"I know. It's difficult to grasp the magnitude of this discovery. I think of nothing else, and yet it still hasn't entirely sunk in. It's historic."

             
"It may be more historic than you think," Keating said.

             
"Oh?" I responded, not certain what he meant.

             
"Yes, we didn't want to radio any of this, and you apparently couldn't have received it anyway, but the investors hired a researcher to look into the
Cape Hatteras
story in depth. Two centuries out, the classified status of the investigation was a bit easier to break into with Ed's influence, but it still had unusually strong covers. You wouldn't believe how secret this whole thing was. It had the highest level of classified status. What we found out was that the whole story hadn’t been told to the public."

             
"That's no surprise. Did you discover anything specific?"

             
"Yes, we did. First, there was no telescope footage. You're aware of the public fervor; everyone wanted to see it. It was a sensation when they refused to release it. The UNAG government at the time said that it was very graphic and that everyone should respect the feelings of the crew’s families. But the evidence never existed as far as we can tell. It's mentioned in the official report but not in any of the classified documents, and we've got most of them, we think."

             
"Most of them? Some documents are still missing?"

             
"Yes, there is a reference in several of them to another file or group of files. The archivists said they should have been released too, but they simply didn't have them. Probably erased decades ago by mistake, or so they claimed."