The Salvagers Read online

  The Salvagers

  By John Michael Godier

  © 2013. J. M. Godier

  www.jmgodier.com

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.

  All rights reserved.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Cover image copyright © 2013 Chalin and Harris Books

  Dedicated to all those people daring enough to expect a bright future for our species.

  Contents

  Chapter 1 June 5, 2461

  Chapter 2 Day 2

  Chapter 3 August

  Chapter 4 Staking the Claim

  Chapter 5 Spin

  Chapter 6 Dead in Space

  Chapter 7 Day 178

  Chapter 8 Day 205. 2300 Hours.

  Chapter 9 Day 206

  Chapter 10 Day 207

  Chapter 11 Day 208

  Chapter 12 Day 217

  Chapter 13 Day 238

  Chapter 14 Day 239

  Chapter 15 Cloak and Dagger

  Chapter 16 Day 240

  Chapter 17 Day 248

  Chapter 18 Day 251

  Chapter 19 Into the Fire

  Chapter 20 Confusion

  Chapter 21 Boarding Party

  Chapter 22 Home

  Chapter 23 Day 314

  Chapter 24 Day 316

  Chapter 25 Day 318

  Chapter 26 Dreamscape

  Chapter 27 Day 327

  Chapter 28 Day 328

  Chapter 29 Day 330

  Chapter 30 Gravity Well

  Chapter 31 The Portsmouth

  Chapter 32 Free Fall

  Chapter 33 Day 332

  Chapter 1 June 5, 2461

  "Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering." - St. Augustine

  There it was, filling the windows of my bridge. The richest and most famous lost shipwreck in the solar system, presenting itself as welcoming and free for the taking. And I knew that it belonged to me. I had found a legend. More accurately, it was the legend.

  I shouldn't have trusted my senses. I should have held my emotions in check. I should have realized that my mind was bathed in that fog that clouds a person's ability to recognize realities and spot future challenges during the initial moments of a discovery. The more I admired it, the more flawless it seemed—pristinely preserved, shining gloriously new. The polished steel plates of its hull reflected the sunlight like diamond facets as it slowly revolved against the black backdrop of space.

  It was pure, dumb, blind luck that we found it. A minor course change in any direction over the previous month, and we'd have missed it entirely. It would have been a passing speck of light to be dismissed as just another chunk of ice or rock like a hundred trillion others dotting the solar system. It must have looked that way to countless other people, for it was well within the main trade routes to the Jupiter colonies, and it was only by chance that no one ever got close enough to see it for what it was.

  Our course brought us just barely within the range of our telescope's ability to identify it. I can't say why I even bothered to look through the eyepiece. Maybe it was the regular rhythm of the light rising and falling that suggested it might be manmade. I wanted a look nonetheless, so when I floated away from my command station and trained the telescope on that bright dot and saw that it was a ship, dead in space and of a style that confirmed its identity, I knew that my greatest moment had come.

  "All stop!" I yelled to my crew.

  Over my 30-year career as a salvager, I'd learned to temper my ideas of what it might be like to find a Holy Grail treasure wreck. In my line of work, unless you keep your expectations in check, you will always meet with disappointment. Like the treasure hunters who plied Earth's old Spanish Main and found that the wood was always rotten and the sunken galleons no longer looked like ships, a wreck in space was almost always a crushed and shattered heap of metal. And that was the most you could expect. Sometimes it was just a widely scattered field of debris or a fresh crater on an asteroid. I'd learned to put little stock in the errant pipe dreams of finding that one perfect ship the other salvagers fantasized about—the one that wasn't utterly destroyed.

  I had always tried to restrict my visions to strictly realistic expectations. I imagined the legendary wrecks as torn-open hulls with loose coins dotting zero-G minefields of human remains and jagged steel ready to shred space suits and punch holes in salvage vessels. Relics like that were no longer ships. They were shipwrecks, pitiful victims of violent accidents and failures that could offer only one certainty: they were always ready to take one more life.

  I'd never dared to envision this particular wreck intact. Seeing its perfection disarmed me. I gathered enough rationality to ask myself whether I was seeing it through rose-colored glasses because I knew what was on the ship. Then the beauty of it finally overwhelmed me again, forcing me to make peace with the thought that it was real. I wasn't alone. Emotions ran high in every member of my crew. They also knew about the cargo; it was the fabled treasure of the Golden Asteroid, the stuff of legends since its loss 200 years earlier.

  We maneuvered closer, watching the ship's name rotate into view. It was emblazoned boldly in matte black letters across the mirror-polished plating of the hull. Cape Hatteras. Seeing its name thrilled us and left us with no uncertainty. There would be no need for lengthy research in dusty half-forgotten archives poring over construction invoices to match up half a serial number on a fragment of wreckage. We knew unequivocally what ship we had found.

  Our slow rising approach brought its enormous bulk into a better perspective. Over 700 feet long and 100 wide, it dwarfed our tiny Amaranth Sun. Its newness was striking and unnatural, looking as though someone had just finished building it and then shut off the lights before promptly forgetting that it had ever existed.

  The Cape Hatteras was a mining vessel launched in 2258 by the Union of North American Governments (UNAG), the successor state to Canadaska, the Mexican Confederacy, and the United States Mark IV, themselves reboots of countries whose original names most people had forgotten. It had one mission: collect as much gold as possible from the asteroid 974-Bernhard and return it to Earth. The UNAG needed rescue from deep national debt and took a gamble, spending nearly a trillion dollars in the currency of the day on the mission. If all had gone as planned, it would have returned a hundred times that sum.

  The UNAG was desperate. If they didn't find a major source of income, they'd have gone bankrupt within a decade and been forced to go the way of the governments they had replaced. It was the same old modus operandi of those times: borrow, spend, go bankrupt, remonetize, and finally come up with some new and unblemished name for the nation. And then, like a tired old scow dressed up with a fresh coat of paint, they would start the cycle over until the next time the polish wore off.

  The loss of the Cape Hatteras had nearly made that bankruptcy immediate. If it hadn't been for a last-minute round of weapons sales that balanced the books, the UNAG would have faded into history. They survived but at a shameful cost: the deal fueled the last major war on Earth. A horror that tore apart Eastern Europe and Asia and left 200 million dead after two decades lost, the Eurasian war finally ended in a stalemate with no one winning a damned thing. But it did teach a lesson to the unions: if you're going to have a war, do i
t in space. Earth itself has been at peace ever since, ruling her empire of colonies, the politics of home always reverberating throughout the solar system.

  We circled the Cape Hatteras and then moved forward to inspect the bow of the ship. Its bridge windows were as black as holes in space, showing no obvious signs of damage but otherwise revealing nothing. Even the direct light of the sun seemed to disappear without a trace into that dark void. The eeriness of it evoked the uncertainty of what had happened after it finished its mission to 974-Bernhard.

  974-Bernhard was also called Walton's Rock after the scientist who had discovered it. Dr. Walton was a preeminent astrogeologist and had spent decades studying the asteroid. It became a singular obsession for him. He was convinced that it held the key, one way or another, to solving all of Earth's troubles. He might have been right in some sense.

  Unlike most asteroids it was filled with heavy metals by virtue of having originally been the center of a large protoplanet's core. An unusually slow rate of cooling allowed the heaviest metals to concentrate before finally solidifying. Then it was blown to bits by the impact of an object two-thirds its size, leaving a chunk of metal and rock floating in space and presenting easy access. Most of it was useless iron and nickel, along with uranium, thorium, and other radioactive scrap not worth the trouble to haul back home. But it was also loaded with gold.

  Walton attached much more importance to it than the value of its metal. From early on he got out into the media to promote his discovery, but when no one shared his vision he grew despondent. The poor man faced every kind of negativity imaginable. Some said that it was too expensive to mine, others commented that it ought to be preserved as it was, and someone even suggested that it be blown up with a particle laser so everyone would quit fighting about it.

  It all proved too much for Dr. Walton. His mental health declined, and he started saying all kinds of crazy things such as that the asteroid was the metaphysical equivalent of the fusion reactor, that it held the key to spiritual happiness, and that it was a transmitter to contact aliens through dreams. His rants became stranger the older he got, and the media were more than willing to let him keep spouting for the entertainment value. He even believed that the UNAG was sending secret missions to 974-Bernhard so they could steal it from him. In the end he was right about the asteroid’s resources, and a decade after he died the Cape Hatteras project commenced.

  We hadn't seen anything that suggested an accident. The hull plating of the ship was intact, and there was no torn or twisted metal that would indicate a violent decompression. We moved on to get a look at the engine nozzles arrayed across the stern. Amazingly, they were sparkling clean, as though someone had recently scrubbed them. Maybe that was a clue, we thought. Perhaps something catastrophic had made the ship's fusion reactors shut down, effectively marooning the crew in outer space. Residues accumulate in engine bells during their use, so to perform a cold restart on a ship's engines you must first spray low-temperature cleaning gel into the nozzles. Then you go through a very involved and tedious process to get everything running again. We speculated that they might have lost power and were trying to get the engines going when they simply ran out of time and oxygen. My crew kept theorizing as we explored further, but my thoughts drifted back to the cargo.

  The Cape Hatteras had mined the asteroid for nearly a year. The ship was equipped with an automated smelting system; as they mined the asteroid, the system would cast the gold into bricks refined to a perfect .9999 fineness. The crew would then catalog and securely strap each brick onto pallets in the cargo hold until they filled it with a titanic amount of gold. It was enough to increase the supply on Earth by a third. If melted into a single block, it would have been 70 feet long and 20 wide and high. They were about to begin their ten-month journey home when contact was lost. No trace of the ship was ever found.

  So many questions haunted the Cape Hatteras’s fate that its fame ensured a dedicated following of enthusiasts. Hundreds of books had been written about it, all of them with a different theory about what had happened. In addition to salvaging its cargo, we hoped that that we'd be able to lay all that controversy to rest and solve the mystery once and for all.

  The UNAG's earlier conclusions about the accident had only added to the conundrum. An official panel was convened to figure the whole thing out, but their answers fell short of satisfying anyone. They determined that the Cape Hatteras had inferior hull plating, claiming that it was too thin to withstand a hit by one of the billions of small boulders that race at high speed around the asteroid belt. One, they proposed, must have struck a weak point in the armor, violently decompressed the ship, and killed its crew of five instantly; however, they had no real proof, just some telemetry readings and a few minutes of footage taken by an orbiting telescope. None of that evidence was released to the public, ostensibly out of concern for the victims’ families. But that evasion led to a veritable fire storm of public speculation that only grew worse as the years wore on, shifting the story from a human tragedy to a romanticized legend.

  Not seeing anything revealing in a horizontal trajectory, I ordered the Amaranth Sun to a vertical position relative to the sun, hoping that our realignment would give us a better chance of spotting something. I wanted no movement at all in order to take advantage of the derelict's own rotation, but the axis of the ship was such that not enough sunlight was reaching where we wanted to see. I ordered our spotlights turned on and set in a diffused pattern that illuminated much of the Cape Hatteras in a bluish light. Again we saw nothing but an expanse of perfectly intact hull.

  I joked with my crew that the ship might still contain a breathable atmosphere. In truth, that was highly unlikely. In all of my years in space, I'd only heard of one ship that stayed pressurized for over a century, much less two. Even 30 years was often too much to ask. The mothballed Solar Regatta ships at Mercury had all gone to vacuum. But the improbable wasn't absolutely impossible, so I allowed myself some small measure of hope because an oxygenated atmosphere, however compromised, would make for an infinitely easier salvage.

  Hope was a good thing, but I had to be careful. It's a tool as much as an emotion, and when misplaced it can lead to disaster. When Earth-bound sailors became spacemen, they kept their old maritime traditions. But hope can eventuate in good luck, so I abandoned the last remnants of my stoic rules and for the first time allowed myself the irrational expectation of an easy salvage. In hindsight, I jinxed it.

  I wasn't new to searching for that wreck. In my younger days I'd spent eight years looking for it on and off. She was supposed to be among the asteroids between Earth and Mars, in a sort of parking orbit where Walton's Rock used to be. The asteroid didn't have the gravity to hold the ship indefinitely, so the two separated over time, and 974-Bernhard was now halfway around the sun from where the Cape Hatteras was projected to be.

  In a search for it I had covered tens of thousands of square miles, sweeping back and forth until the money ran out and the investors lost heart. I wasn't the only one. No fewer than 100 failed attempts litter treasure-hunting history. They all failed because the ship just wasn't where it was supposed to be, so more recent expeditions were forced to widen their search area to an impossibly large swath of space that would have taken centuries to cover. It had become a long shot.

  I thought it probably never would be found. I had chalked up the whole thing to the uncertainty of the solar system. Jupiter can deflect an asteroid in a close encounter, and then that asteroid's gravity can alter the course of anything it passes. Even if it's just a tiny deviation, it is still cumulative, and after 200 years something can be a million miles away from where calculations indicate it should be. It doesn't take long to become a needle in a haystack the size of the Sun. But even that consideration didn't explain where we found the Cape Hatteras.

  We’re not talking about relatively small distances such as a million miles. It was 200 million miles away from where it should have been. The Cape Hatteras was completel
y outside the asteroid belt in lockstep with a large trojan asteroid that had settled near Jupiter in a resonant solar orbit. It's really not an asteroid, but rather a burned-out comet full of ice and carbon. In its glory days it would have traveled in and out of proximity to the Sun, the melting ice periodically releasing a gaseous comet's tail. 974-Bernhard had taken too many trips and no longer had enough horsepower to form much more than a fuzzy haze. All we could surmise was that it must have passed through the asteroid belt one last time and picked up the derelict before Jupiter's immense gravity finally captured them both and dragged them to a quiet retirement at a Lagrange point about 20 million miles from the planet.

  We were in the area by accident on our way to Earth, after salvaging an old NASA probe from the late 21st century. The Smithsonian was paying us to bring it home, saying something about its being the first probe to carry a true fusion engine. NASA had wanted to study an impending Jovian comet impact close up, but were left with little time to test the new propulsion. In case the fusion engine failed, they equipped the probe with one of the most powerful chemical rockets ever built the ensure the mission's success. It was never needed, and that left us with several full tanks of unstable rocket fuel to contend with.

  There was no way to vent it into space, and the Smithsonian wanted that rocket engine as much as the rest of the probe, so we detached it and stored it in the only safe place we had: strapped to the heavy plating that covered the stern of the Amaranth Sun. We'd have been in serious trouble if those had exploded, but no one ever said salvage work was without risk.

  To be completely honest, I hated retrieval missions. They were mundane and boring. Treasure hunting is far more fun. But pleasure is one thing, and paying the bills is another. The simple fact is that, if you're willing to spend the time, the solar system is filled with trash and artifacts left over from centuries of human exploration that someone is always willing to pay for.