The Salvagers (18 page)

             
"No, Captain Hunter, there wasn't. Now if you'll excuse me, I have work to do."

             
"Those crystals came from that cave, didn't they? They are important."

             
Dr. Westmoreland didn’t answer but simply left the room. He usually shared information freely, but not now. Maybe I had outlived my usefulness, and there no longer was any reason to dangle carrots.

             
I sat with the Captain in awkward silence. He had gone back to concentrating on his meal, and I tried to focus on finishing my own. I was relieved when another officer appeared.

             
"Mr. Hunter, Captain, you're both needed on the bridge."

             
"On my way," the Captain said as he left the room like a racer hearing a starting gun.

             
"Why?" I asked as the officer and I shot toward the bridge.

             
"The
Hyperion
has contacted us. Someone's disappeared."

Chapter 22
    
Home

              "December 23, 2259. 0800 hours. Log of Captain John Andrew Nelson, Commanding Officer, UNAG Mining Vessel
Cape Hatteras
. I have had to expend a great deal of fuel to maintain my orbit. I have confirmed the reason why: the asteroid's gravity has increased. There is no other explanation; no other known mechanism in the laws of physics could cause it. Yet, it is physically impossible.

             
I have no contact with my men on the surface. I do not know how the increased gravity will affect them. I cannot help them. The crystals are important. They seem to be growing, gaining mass through an unknown process. It could be related to the gravity. I feel ill, unclear, and very tired. I sense there is someone here with me, but I know there is no one."

              I was relieved to get off that warship. I couldn't take any more of Dr. Westmoreland and the Captain of the
Portsmouth
's double talk, and frankly they both had become outright strange. I couldn't tell what parts of the picture were misinformation and what parts were the truth. I returned to the salvor first. At least there everything made sense. For all the faults of Dr. Webb and his team, they spoke openly and candidly.

             
I was greeted in the
Hyperion
's
airlock by my ex-wife. Seeing her was a pleasure, which was a conflicted feeling to be sure, because I was seeing the first honestly readable face in days. I could tell from her expression that things were not well on the ship.

             
"We lost someone, Cam," Janet said.

             
"Are you certain? Have you searched the ship?"

             
"Yes, and we know where he was. It had to be the anomaly again."

             
"Who was it?"

             
She hesitated. "It was Sanjay Maheshtra."

             
I experienced a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. This wasn't someone I barely knew. It was Sanjay Maheshtra, someone I had grown close to and liked.

             
"What happened?" I asked.

             
"He'd gone off duty after finishing an analysis of the archeological placement of some objects on the derelict. He was alone for less than an hour before another crewman stopped by his quarters to drop off his laundry and found him missing."

             
"You searched the entire ship stem to stern?"

             
She didn't answer but just darted the usual look she gives me when I say something ridiculous.

             
"Still, we'll need to do a second search. I want to be very thorough before I inform Dr. Westmoreland. If I don't, he'll want to send a crew of his own over here to investigate. I'd like to keep the military off our ships as much as possible. Hopefully, a solid report will satisfy him."

             
I was being only half truthful. I hoped we'd find Sanjay alive and well, perhaps reading in some remote part of the ship. You do that out of shock, grasping at straws and praying that the news you've been given is somehow wrong. I didn't want to alarm Janet, but the other thing left unsaid was that a boarding crew would probably be made up of soldiers, and they would not leave their arms behind. Soldiers on my ships meant that they could seize control of them, using whatever excuse UNAG devised. We would have no way of stopping them. I trusted Westmoreland to at least be civil, but I didn't trust the Captain at all.

             
Janet was hard at work, hoping to get more of the
Cape Hatteras
's
systems running, and wanted to get back to it. That left me alone in one of the two main halls of the salvor. I looked out the gallery windows that ran down the corridor. From that vantage point I could see all members of the fleet. It was a minor comfort to see our ships together again with the derelict, but I longed to get back to the
Amaranth Sun
. I hadn't talked with my crew in two days, and as much as I wanted to share my wealth of new information with the academicians, I felt that the time was not yet right. If I kept my mouth shut, I might prove my trustworthiness to Westmoreland and the Captain, such that they would be more forthcoming.

             
I stayed on the salvor long enough to supervise the search. Sanjay was nowhere to be found. I dutifully sent my report to Westmoreland, but I went much further than simply telling him about the disappearance. I included a very detailed account of my hallucinations up to that point, especially those on the
Victorious
. He'd asked me about them before, so if anyone would understand and not think I was crazy, it was he. Westmoreland didn't personally come over to the
Hyperion,
but he did send two officers to check things out. I was pleasantly surprised: they were unarmed and left quickly. My respect for Westmoreland rose again, albeit slightly.

             
Another surprise came in the form of a progress update
he
sent. I suppose he felt obligated after receiving mine. He and the Captain had been busy with devising a way to tow the
Cape Hatteras
to Titan. It seemed workable, but nothing would make me enthusiastic about the idea. I had to face reality: at least until that disappearance business was solved, I needed the authorities more than they needed me. Without them we would be at the mercy of whatever it was we were dealing with.

             
I reluctantly endorsed the plan. Early the next day the
Portsmouth
took the derelict in tow, and our little fleet charted a course for Saturn's largest moon, Titan.

             
I was preparing to return to the
Amaranth Sun
when Janet returned and pulled me aside. "Cam, there's another matter," she said. "Our week on the derelict gave me plenty of time to look at the logs."

             
I still hadn't had a chance to see them. One of the things I did on the
Hyperion
was to transfer copies to the
Amaranth Sun
so I could finally read them.

             
"What did you find?"

             
"Cam, Nelson went crazy. He abandoned his men on the asteroid. The last ten or so communications he received were pleas for rescue, but he ignored them all. He just kept talking about some kind of crystals in the geological samples and how important they were. He kept assuming that his crew was dead, even while his communications panels were lit up with messages from them. It's all damned odd."

             
"I found the samples in his quarters. Westmoreland has them now. Not very interesting crystals, if you ask me, just dirty black things."

             
"Do they have anything to do with the disappearances?"

             
"He doesn't know, and I'm sworn to secrecy. I can't really say much else."

             
"Well, going nuts is one thing, but there was no corpse. Do you think the phenomenon might have been manipulating him and then made him disappear like our people?" she asked.

             
"We don't know that it did. He could simply have shot himself out an airlock. Crazy people do crazy things. Look, I promise to tell you more just as soon as I can," I said.

             
She wasn't happy with that, but it's not as though she'd have told me what she knew if I were in her position. When I finally got back to the
Amaranth Sun
, the ship was a hornet's nest. Not one person there was any happier with me than my ex-wife was. All they'd heard from me in days were relayed messages from the
Portsmouth
, along with orders to go here and there without any explanation, and not a word about why that huge warship disappeared into a hole with a blue ring around it.

             
"Where the hell have you been?" Stacey asked angrily.

             
"Busy!" I said. "And do I have a story for you!" I might not tell the academicians what I knew, but I could tell my own crew some of it. They were my family and best friends whom I trusted them implicitly. Telling them would also divert my attention from Sanjay's death.

             
"It had better be good," Stacey said, "or we're going to have a mutiny."

             
"It is!" I replied, before recounting everything that had happened on the submarine. Then I told them about the disappearing warship and the chaos onboard the
Portsmouth
. They were spellbound, listening intently over drinks as I triumphantly aired the UNAG's dirty laundry. It felt great to get some of that off my chest.

             
It continued going well until I told them why we were going to Titan.

             
"Titan?" they said in unison.

             
"This is a treasure salvage, not a tour of the outer planets," Neil reminded me.

             
"Don't worry. Everything is under control. We'll get our treasure home, and it's not every day that you get invited to Titan," I replied, hoping to calm them down.

             
"I've heard that secret things happen there. Aliens and secret projects, that kind of thing," said Kurt.

             
"I've never heard that. They do engine research," I answered, not wanting to betray Westmoreland's trust.

             
"Yeah, I know an engineer who worked there for a few months on some kind of fuel-efficiency project. He said that most of the complex was off-limits. I told him it wasn't surprising that engine research would be secretive, but he said it was more than that. He also said that strange things happened while he was there. He even heard a rumor that they had an alien spacecraft hidden there so they could reverse-engineer its engines."

             
"They said that about Area 51 some 400 years ago," Stacey retorted. "It was just an elaborate hoax to draw attention away from the test projects that went on there. Now it's a museum."

             
"I'm just saying what I heard," Kurt replied.

             
"I heard it from the horse's mouth. Westmoreland is doing secret research there," I said.

             
"Talking to horses," Neil quipped. "No wonder you didn't call home. Why don't we give them the
Cape Hatteras
and get the
Hyperion
back to Earth and be rich?"

             
I glanced at my son disapprovingly.

             
"It's an old saying. And I couldn't call you. Those people on that warship kept me busy. Besides, Ed Iron wants that ship," I said.

             
"I know. I'm just glad to have you back and I'm sick of your being in constant danger and not letting me help."

             
I was going to try to come up with something reassuring but quickly gave up. A few hours later Janet interrupted us with a transmission.

             
"Cam, they've released us to board the
Cape Hatteras
again. We're not supposed to remove anything, but that Westmoreland creep doesn't think the danger is any worse there than on any of the other ships. I don't like it one bit that we need the military's permission to board our own derelict."

             
"I don't either. Open it up to the specialists then and see whether you can get anything else out of those logs."

             
"Will do. Oh, I have some good news. I know it will waste a lot of time to have Ed's tow ship go all the way out to Saturn to retrieve the
Cape Hatteras
, but I think we've solved that problem," she said.

             
"What have you got?"

             
"I didn't want to raise your hopes until we were sure, but we believe that we can get the engines running and bring her back to Earth under her own power if you refuel the
Cape Hatteras
at Titan. She's not a slow ship with those 100,000 lzs helium thrust giants she's got."

             
I was floored. It was hard to imagine an ancient ship firing its own engines and entering Earth orbit with every camera in the Earth-Moon system watching. It would be a sensation. I knew that Ed Iron would adore the idea.

             
"Refueling certainly isn't a problem at Saturn," I said. "It's a giant ball of helium. Do it. You have no idea how fantastic that will be! Ed will probably give your team a huge bonus, and I'll personally give you a huge kiss."

             
"Bonus yes, kiss no," she said before ending the transmission abruptly.