The Salvagers (27 page)

             
We were close enough. The debris would fall into Saturn's atmosphere within a few short hours. There would not be enough time for the crystals to grow again to critical mass, nor for the UNAG to get a ship to Saturn to retrieve the pieces. We would be successful, but we too were part of that debris field. We had no way of preventing ourselves from falling to our deaths along with my gold.

Chapter 32
      
Free Fall

             
"Office of Rear Admiral Jonah T. Carlin. Admiralty Administration Complex, Union of North American Governments, Montreal, Province of Verbec. January 19, 2258. Eyes only, HALCYON clearance required. To the Director of UNAG Intelligence, Dr. Augustin Sato, Los Angeles, Province of Calorwa. The top-secret probe sent by the Halcyon project to 974-Bernhard has returned readings that strongly suggest the presence of M-DM crystalline mineral of a much higher purity than those from the 2078 Valles Marineris samples. Recovery of the material will allow a more thorough study of the Matter-Dark Matter molecular bond.

             
"As you are aware, we first suspected the presence of the mineral through the delusional statements of Dr. Walton. In the years following the completion of his top-secret study of the Mars crystals, he grew inordinately fascinated with the asteroid belt. His compulsion led him to the discovery of 974-Bernhard and ultimately the loss of his sanity. We believe this was due to long-term exposure to the mineral. It was much the same effect seen in Dr. Leland Strunk, leader of the 2078 Mars mission, after his handling of the material over a nine-month period as his expedition returned home.

             
"They both refered to something they called 'the source,' both men using identical terminology, which is believed to be a reference to 974-Bernhard. Dr. Walton was not aware of the highly classified ramblings of Dr. Strunk after his isolation and confinement to the Ramsey Institute for Mental Health, where he remained under the previous government's supervision until his death. Due in large part to the extremely unlikely nature of those correlating statements, we suspect some form of intelligent alien life may have been communicating information to those men. The mechanism and extent of the alien's ability to do this remains unclear.

             
"Within the coming month we will present you with a plan to recover material from the asteroid and the specifics of what we will need from your organization."

              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 effects 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?"