The Salvagers (6 page)

Chapter 8
    
Day 205. 2300 Hours.

              After that long day I should have left things at poking my head inside. If I had been an archeologist instead of a salvager, I'd have followed strict protocol and waited until morning to go in. That was the smart thing to do—start fresh and rested, ready to be methodical and careful. But I was a treasure hunter, and although I intended be sensitive to anything I found, I needed to live the moment and go deeper inside.

             
I called for Neil to accompany me, due to his close experience with the ship. An archeologist had arrived on the
Hyperion
, so I asked for him as well to temper our enthusiasm with a dose of professionalism. He jumped at the chance with as much excitement as Neil did.

             
I liked Dr. Maheshtra, or Sanjay as he preferred to be called. After shaking hands with all the academicians during the dinner party on the
Hyperion
, it was clear that professional enthusiasm abounded. But Sanjay stood out as the only one who seemed willing to admit the absolute importance of the gold. I could work with a man like that, so I decided that he would be the first of the scholars to see the derelict up close.

             
I went first by lightly pushing myself into the interior of the
Cape Hatteras
. I found myself in  a passageway running the length of the ship that was similar in function to the central corridor on the
Amaranth Sun.
The ship had two, one on either side, that formed a kind of enclosed promenade extending from the bridge to the engineering compartment. We had chosen an entry point near the center of that passageway, or as close to it as we could get without having to slice through a main rib.

             
It was pitch black in there. I had a miner's light on the top of my helmet, so I flipped it on, producing a disappointing six-inch patch of illumination. I wasn't going to see much with it, and I hadn't thought to grab a flashlight from the
Amaranth Sun
. I had the others turn their headlamps on.

             
"First thing in the morning, we'll need to bring in some decent lighting," I said.

              Sanjay and Neil followed closely. Everyone else remained outside, both to minimize the impact we would have on the pristine ship but also to rescue us if need be. While the
Cape Hatteras
’s exterior looked great, the inside could easily be a mess of dangerous debris. Our communications with the outside world would be blocked by the ship's thick steel hull, so I left instructions that if we weren't back in two hours, someone should come to look for us.

             
"Right or left?" I asked.

             
"Left, to the bridge," Sanjay said.

             
"Right, to the treasure," Neil retorted.

             
I had to break the tie. "Left. The gold isn't going anywhere."

             
Ever since Keating had filled my head with burning questions, I was eager to find out what had really happened to the
Cape Hatteras
. The bridge was the most likely place to find some answers. We edged our way down the corridor. I'd like to say I was being safety-conscious, and that did play a part, but there were also five bodies somewhere on that ship. I didn't want to lunge head first into one.

             
The ship's interior was as cold as deep space. I noticed a thin coat of frost on the walls. That required condensation—not something you see in shipwrecks very often. Frost can form only in a pressurized atmosphere. In a violent decompression things happen so fast that any moisture goes right out the hole. The
Cape Hatteras
must have lost its air very slowly, allowing its moisture to freeze out. That was a clue.

             
All of the compartment doors were wide open, which was odd. The first thing you do during a decompression is to close doors. On larger ships like the
Cape Hatteras
, they're built airtight so you can seal off the area where the leak is. If the derelict decompressed slowly, there should have been plenty of time to shut them and save the ship. For some unknown reason its crew didn't do that. We stopped at each open door, shining our tiny miner's lights into the darkness beyond.

             
The first room was a galley, spotlessly clean except for a coating of frost. Food packets and prepared meals were stacked in containers mounted to the walls, with a metal table and a cooking unit in the center of the room.

             
"They're probably still good," I told the others. "There really isn't much that can happen to food in open space. It's just a few degrees above absolute zero in here, with no light or air to damage the provisions. I once heard of a crew doing a run between Saturn and Earth that ate 90-year-old food on the mothballed ISS XII station when an accident thawed their own supplies. They claimed that the meal was delicious."

             
"Is that where the milk cow steaks came from?" Neil asked. I ignored him.

             
We floated forward, not lingering too long in the galley. A long row of assay facilities, control rooms for mining equipment, and computer labs followed, but no sign of the crew. Just aft of the bridge we found the communications center. That was where we most expected to find a body, since in the event of a disaster you always want someone sending maydays. In the vast distances of space the chances for rescue are slight, but at least you could consult with engineers back home, talk to your loved ones, or simply make sure everyone knew what had happened.

             
The instrument settings revealed that a crew member had been in contact with home. The dials were set to the standard emergency channel—a direct line to the Admiralty Administration in Montreal—with both the record and transmit tabs depressed, meaning that someone had been making logs and transmitting them at the same time. But whoever it was, he or she hadn't died in that room.

             
Things were much the same on the bridge: there was no sign of anyone. The computers weren't working, as expected. Then we noticed something odd: the ship's wheel was stowed. That seemed unlikely during an emergency and a cold restart. With no engines you wouldn't have the ship automatically navigating and maintaining its heading. I wondered whether it were possible that the crew of the
Cape Hatteras
may have intentionally set a course to Jupiter and allowed the ship to run out of fuel. The ship was last reported to be in the orbit of 974-Bernhard and had only enough helium to return home. It shouldn't have been underway anywhere as far as anyone knew, and if it was then it
should
have been in the direction of Earth. Two centuries ago there were no colonies at the gas giants for refueling, meaning that going out there was a one-way trip.

             
"We've got to get a look at the ship's logs," I said. "This wreck just gets stranger by the minute."

             
"I'll make it my top priority when we restore electrical power," Sanjay replied.

             
"Can we go and see the gold yet?" Neil asked.

             
"We should make a full circuit down the other corridor. It will take us to the hold," I said. I had the schematics of the
Cape Hatteras
memorized, having had a poster of them in my room when I was a kid.

             
We passed down the twin corridor on the other side. It was a mirror image of the other, with no sign of anyone. The only difference was that the doors to the crew's quarters were closed. That's standard, since no one leaves the door to their private space open. We left them unexplored as they were possible locations of the bodies.

             
"Once we get to the hold, we should be able to pass through the engineering compartment and come out the other side through a second door. We'll be in the same corridor we started in," I said.

             
We passed a transverse corridor that led to the other side of the ship. Its floor was cocked at an odd angle, the entry stoop sitting two feet above the level of the corridor, frozen where it had been when it lost power.

             
"What's down there?" Neil asked.

             
"Crew amenities. We're in a rotating gravity section. There's a gymn, recreation area, and dining hall."

             
"Do you think the crew could be in there?"

             
"Maybe, but I doubt it. You don't watch a movie when your ship is losing air."

             
"Unless you don't know it's leaking out," Sanjay said.

             
"We'll see several of these crossings. The next one leads to the secondary reactor rooms."

             
"Shouldn't we explore those areas?" Sanjay asked.

             
"I'll leave that up to you and your colleagues. You can be the first to explore them." I responded. Those rooms were of little importance to my goals that night. It was late, and we needed to move on and see the gold. We reached the door to the hold a short time later. Unlike doors elsewhere on the ship, this one was closed tight.

             
"We'll have to crank it open by hand. Stand back," I warned. It was well worth playing it safe. If the hold was still pressurized, the escaping air would be powerful and might carry debris, possibly even gold bars that could shatter a space helmet. It wouldn't be the first time that happened. A salvage crew was sent to retrieve a capsule left by the fifteenth manned mission to Mars, abandoned nearly four centuries ago. Everyone assumed its pressurization wouldn't have held up that long, but when they popped the hatch it blew plastic shards from a broken computer screen straight into a man's space suit, killing him. I wasn't going to take that chance, even if it was one in a million.

             
I stood to the side of the door and cranked the manual release. There was no rushing air, and the compartment door slid open easily. Then came that sudden flush of excitement you feel in your chest when something truly wonderful is about to happen. We must have moved faster than at any other time in our exploration that day to get ourselves inside that hold and shine our tiny lights on the cargo. We were not disappointed.

             
"It's still here!" I said, as both of my companions were struck speechless.

             
Row after row of gold bars flashed brilliantly in our miner's lights. It was more than a bank vault, it was a royal treasury. I'd never seen anything like it, even in old pictures of Fort Knox. The bars were stacked neatly, strapped to metal pallets across the forward quarter of the hold.

             
"We're so . . . rich," Neil said.

             
"And I thought my grandchildren would still be paying off the loan for my degree," Sanjay remarked.

             
I did some quick math in my head. Even after dividing it into shares, I was now one of the wealthiest men in the UNAG. We stayed for half an hour marvelling at the magnitude of the haul. We were looking at the fabled treasure of the
Cape Hatteras
.
Fairytales were told to children about it. I'd bet every salvager in the solar system started their career specifically to look for it, and I was the one who had bagged it.

             
"It's late," I said. "We need to move on. Everyone's waiting for us, and we need to get back to the salvor and come up with a plan for tommorrow."

             
It was hard to stop staring, but when we finally moved on we ran into a problem: the doors to the engine room were welded shut from the inside. To go through them, we'd have had to cut our way in, and we weren't prepared for that. The path across the hold was blocked by a large mass of stowed mining gear, so we were left to return the way we had come until we found one of the transverse corridors.

             
"It's not unusual to weld a door shut if you don't need it. They had two and may have decided to install additional equipment and needed the extra wall space," I said.

             
"Is it possible the crew welded themselves into the engineering compartment to save themselves? Would there be any advantage to doing that?" Sanjay asked with a slight hint of India in his speech that I hadn't detected before. I suspected he was nervous.

             
"Well, the walls on ships are usually built thicker in the engine room in case something explodes, but it's probably no more airtight than the rest of the doors. It's just armored," Neil said.

             
I didn't think the crew would be in engineering either. It didn't seem like the place you'd go to spend your last moments. When you're losing your air, you don't need propulsion; you need rescue. You'd put on a moon suit to buy a few more hours and head for the communications room.