SIX
“Why didn’t our computers calculate the possibility of the impact earlier?!”
Almost an hour had passed since the crash, but Captain Morrisey was still savaging.
“How can you calculate in advance the outcome of the interaction of a million elements?” Iarrey repeated for the fiftieth time. “I’ve analyzed the final minutes data several times. There’s no way we could have predicted it. It was a sequence of collisions, which began—I’m sure you’ll find this funny—with the Nomad’s entry onto the edge of the junk belt. The pieces pushed away by the deflective field set off the process which ended up with that.”
He pointed at the sorry-looking remains, which had once been two proud warships.
Morrisey looked at him reproachfully. He said nothing, but his expression was enough to quieten Iarrey. On the screen they could still see the whirling cloud of dust, within which the two wrecks had disappeared and with them the hope of finding the objects belonging to Admiral Tahomey. Most valuable objects which would have guaranteed all the members of the crew an affluent life for many years to come.
“We have plenty of loot in the hold,” Bourne murmured in a conciliatory manner.
“It’s a pile of shit!”
“A pile of antique shit, worth a tidy fortune,” Annataly corrected the captain. “We’ve never cleaned up like that earlier. You’d said so yourself before the impact.”
Morrisey looked at her in anger.
“Do you know what we could have found in Tahomey’s private quarters?” When she shook her head, he added grimly, “For his private log, certain individuals would have paid the equivalent of the value of this ship … or more.”
“You should have started the looting on the bridge then,” the navigator jibed at him.
“Don’t piss me off, Annataly!” the captain roared, dropping into his chair. “Beginning with the bridge is like … like starting your dinner by eating the dessert.”
Nike smiled blandly. The navigator was right; Morrisey only had himself to blame. If he hadn’t been robbing the dead so zealously …
“Bad luck, plain bad luck,” Iarrey said, trying to calm things down. He’d hidden behind the nearest control panel, just in case. “There was nothing we could do, sir. An act of God.”
“What act of God?” The captain shook his head and suddenly burst out laughing. “Don’t you fucking know who’s God here?”
“You are, sir,” mumbled Annataly.
“Correct,” Iarrey seemed to agree with her.
“Don’t blaspheme, Henrichard,” bridled Father Pedroberto, who had been quiet up to then. Bourne had woken him after the collision. “Let’s do our duty, and be happy with what we have. What’s done can’t be undone, as the Good Book says, and there’ll surely be other opportunities to make money. Most importantly no one got hurt.”
Morrisey turned away from the screen, where more fragments of the battleship and corvette began to burn in the upper layers of the atmosphere of the fourth planet of system V3a13. He looked like a little boy who had just been told he wouldn’t get the toy he’d seen in a holonet ad.
“Amen,” he said, clenching both his good hand and his prosthesis.
Nike watched him with a mixture of disgust and fascination. Captain Morrisey never ceased to puzzle him. In just a few seconds an old man despairing at his loss turned back into the vigorous officer he was.
“Get to work!” Morrisey yelled, letting go of his armrests. The one on the right bore the clear marks. It probably wasn’t the first time it had been molested by Morrisey’s metal fingers. “Tidy up this mess, before the rest of it disperses.”
“The collapsars are configured and ready to go,” Iarrey reported, smiling and winking at Annataly. “According to my calculations, two medium-strength ones should be enough to collect up all that trash from the L-point. I’ve already keyed in the coordinates.”
Morrisey sat up straight in his chair and quickly scanned the data passing across the holoscreens.
“What are you waiting for? My blessing?!” he shouted, and the crew instantly knew their good old captain was back. Capricious, yes, but at the same time very down to earth. Even Nike had to admit the guy had great charisma, although he could be a vicious bastard, too.
Shocks were felt as they cast off the two collapsars. The Nomad had eight of them. Two light, four medium, and two of maximum power. Until that moment Nike hadn’t heard much about those incredibly efficient—but also simple—devices, which weren’t used beyond the Recycling Corps. Created as an element of orbital defense, the collapsars only served one purpose today; positioned in the proximity of space garbage dumps they attracted like magnets—or perhaps more like black holes—every atom of matter around: from space dust to the biggest asteroids to the wrecks of antique battleships. When the collapsar’s gauges registered that the quantity of attracted mass had stopped increasing, it set off toward the nearest star, and some time later—could be even after many months—it burned up, vanishing from the Universe forever.
The medium collapsar could attract from the libration point and then bind up a mass of a hundred million tons. The strongest ones were ten to twenty times more powerful, although they weren’t used near inhabited planets anymore. However, they were useful when it came to destroying well in advance large asteroid concentrations approaching inhabited systems.
Right now two such devices, visible on the Nomad’s screens, were gliding majestically to their assigned positions. They only needed another ten minutes or so to attain full power when around them would begin to emerge miniature models of spiral galaxies, with specks of cosmic dust representing stars and the fragments of the wrecks forming nebulas.
Fascinated by this sight, Nike focused his entire attention on one of the golden pyramids, around which smaller fragments had begun to gather. It did not last long, though; the image suddenly sparkled and where a moment earlier there had been a whirling cloud of dust there was now clean space and a dead planet suspended far away.
“—what the galacticunt is that supposed to be?” Coming back to his senses, he heard the end of the sentence hissed out by Morrisey.
“I carried out a routine check on the data from the remaining L-points in this system,” Iarrey explained. “The probes found another wreck graveyard near Theta.”
“What are you talking about?” the captain stormed. “That fucked in the fractal chunk of frozen rock is a billion clicks from the central star. No one fought over Theta, because there was nothing there. The fight was here, over the only fucking gateway in the sector.”
He poked a finger into the control panel. “We don’t have anything about the other place, no records, no mentions; not from the High Command’s archives nor from the rebels themselves. I’ve never ever heard of any battles in that region!”
“I know, sir, I prepared the reports for you myself, but readings don’t lie.” The first officer was quite clearly unconcerned by the captain’s speech or mentions of High Command’s archives. “The probes located over seventeen million tons of garbage in the Theta’s L-point.”
“It probably intercepted some bloody asteroid field,” Morrisey said disdainfully.
“I’ve only just started gathering readings now, but the preliminary data point to a very high metal content,” Iarrey informed, not backing down.
“Have you never heard of ores?” The captain collapsed into his chair and spat on the floor. “Perhaps it’s an iron moon shot to fuck by an asteroid.”
“I’ve been checking, sir,” Annataly cut in. “The system’s schema totally match the data from the period of its registration.”
“Honey, perhaps that bird brain of yours hasn’t registered it, but this Big Bang butthole-shafted Universe is a squillion fucking times older than our oldest atlases.” Morrisey groaned. “A battle in which both sides had lost such an immense tonnage would have resounded throughout the known Universe. If you ask me, they’re regular iron asteroids orbiting some half-baked clone-of-a-bitch pretending to be a planet.”
The number of curse words per sentence indicated Morrisey’s growing irritation. Although he’d stopped talking, no one wanted to take up the subject, at least not for the next few minutes.
“You’re right, sir,” began the incandescently furious navigator finally. “Still, we have to hang around here until both collapsars finish their work.”
“Which ought to take”—Iarrey made some rapid calculations—“at best, two hundred and seventy-two hours until the moment we put the collected mass on its terminal course.”
“We can leave the numbers in orbit or send a few probes to monitor the process,” the cornet-pilot suggested eagerly. “We’ll manage to reach Theta and return before that pile of scrap moves away from Delta’s orbit for good.”
“We can’t leave that shit unattended,” Nike decided to speak up. “According to the directives, that planet is scheduled for repopulation.”
“Fine, so we have twelve days to lounge around,” Annataly summed up. “Twelve days of boredom, hibernation, or checking that L-point.”
Morrisey snorted.
“We aren’t going to race around the entire system chasing rainbows.”
“And what if there’s something valuable?” she asked with an ingratiating smile. “Something that’ll compensate us for the disaster with the Odin?”
The captain stared at the central screen as though he hoped he might spot something at such a great distance.
“Nothing could compensate me for the loss of Tahomey’s log,” he said after a moment. “You can trust me, honey, that in this part of the Universe there’s never been anything more valuable from our point of view. But all right, if it makes you feel better, we’ll go there. Stachursky, get back to the archives and check all—and I mean all—available information about this system’s history. In particular any records regarding the gateway. That includes private correspondence of people who’d served here before the war. Bourne, study the data from Theta’s libration point. Before we get into its orbit I want to have complete reports on my terminal …”
He stopped for a moment and scanned them all grimly. “I know we’re wasting time, which is why there’s one more proviso: if we don’t find anything interesting, you all get docked three percent of shares from this expedition.”
“And what if we do?” Nike asked, surprising everyone.