Jack Chalker - Melchior's Fire

“Yeah, I think so. Palm on, got a green, now I’m punching in the security code.”

There was a hiss as the very tight vacuum seal on the door let loose and pressure equalized.

“Okay,” she said, “Turning the latch now, then getting back!”

She turned the big security latch and could feel the cold creeping in even before the door opened. There was a frigid blast, and then the suit was tossed in and the door reclosed. She felt suddenly like she was trapped in a refrigerator, although the safety systems in the command and control center popped on blowing warm air back in.

She pulled the latch back down, worried that she might stick to it in the cold and relieved when she didn’t, even though her hand felt slightly frostbitten from just that little touch. Now she examined the suit, reached in, powered it up and turned on the internal heating. It wouldn’t be warm until she sealed it up with her inside, but it wouldn’t freeze her toes off, either.

For a moment she got the paranoia back. What if some of that stuff had gotten into the suit? When she got in and sealed it… But, no, she couldn’t think that way. If she did, she’d never get out of here.

Put it on, put it on, seal it up, check all systems… God it’s cold! Verify power and working heat, then verify she was at vacuum setting. She heard the seals go tight, knew she was now in a smaller biosphere but as isolated from the outside as anything in the C and C. It was starting to heat up, and the internal readings said she should be comfortable, but she just kept feeling the cold.

There was no longer a secure seal on the door, so she went over, unlatched it, and opened it. Jerry turned his helmet light back on and smiled, and she did the same so he could see that nothing had crept in at the last minute. They both turned and looked at Sark.

“You, too, Sark. Lights on,” Nagel told him. “This is nightmare city right now.”

Sark grumbled but turned on his internal light. Unless the thing had learned more nasty tricks, it was Sark, looking nervous and pissed.

“Okay, Lucky, decompress the unit, and, for good measure, we’ll do the C and C room now, too,” Nagel called to the pilot. “Just in case.”

“Got it, lover boy,” Cross responded. “Come on home to Big Sister and we’ll see if Mama will take in the prodigals…”

Before the Great Silence, what the Stanley crew had managed would have garnered applause, awards, instant fame and glory, and even poor Achmed would have gotten a statue at the very least. The Earth System Combine would then have dispatched a military unit including a battleship capable of turning a planet into dust to the system, and then if dialogue was irrelevant, and they couldn’t be talked out of it, the threat would be totally vaporized.

That was something governments on a wide colonial level were good for.

But there wasn’t such a government, hadn’t been such a government or colonial empire for almost two centuries now. There were still some massive naval vessels and even combat groups, but they were responsible only to themselves and their officers and, although they claimed to still police the spaceways, they were often hard to tell from the pirates and private armies that prowled the region. A report would be sent to the nearest naval group, of course, since it would no more want that creature to get out of its planetary prison than anyone else would, but whether or not it would be considered enough of a threat to waste precious energy on was problematical. They hadn’t been there.

At least no other salvagers would be tempted to try because of the potential profits. That was what Sark and Nagel had been doing while Achmed had sealed the cliff entrances. Planting and igniting enough thermite bombs to reduce all those greenhouses and all that potential salvage to bubbling, hissing primal goo.

They had reason to be proud of themselves, too. They’d stopped possibly the greatest threat to all humanity in its tracks and they’d done whatever they could to keep it there. A half dozen dirty old salvagers and a beaten-up old salvage ship. All that with the loss of just one of their number.

And they would have felt proud, if you could have spent proud, or gotten some reward for being noble. Instead, they were going back to Sepuchus, a dirty, smoky little planet that was the current headquarters of the Kajani Salvage Works, the company that had chartered the Stanley to go get that dead colony’s physical remains and bring them back to be recycled and remade into new things once again.

That was what the crew had been hired to do, and that was what they most definitely had not done. The lease on the Stanley plus the time and the expendables was substantial. The crews were the least of the expenses, though; they drew no salaries, and worked for a percentage of the wholesale value of the salvage.

If the Kajani family could eat the expense, they would still take a huge hit on the expenses and the extensive base unit repairs and have little new to sell; if they couldn’t, then a venerable old company would be bankrupted and taken over by creditors. Either way, the crew of the Stanley would get absolutely nothing, and might well be black carded by the guilds, branding them unreliable and therefore unemployable. There were more crews than ships these days.

There would be no gold, no laurel wreaths down the metaphorical Appian Way for saving humanity. That hadn’t been their job, either.

“I really think that we made one and only one big mistake back there,” Jerry Nagel commented over coffee in the Stanley ’s cozy lounge.

Randi Queson looked up from examining her scientific notes and responded, “Yes?”

“I think we should have just brought the damned worm back. Keep it in the base unit, all sealed up, and then drop it on the first bank that shows up.”

She sighed. “And you think that just because it would absorb the bank that it wouldn’t foreclose anyway?”

“You’ve got a point. Too much alike to begin with, banks and worms.”

“Have you thought what you might do?” she asked him.

He shrugged. “I’m an engineer without references at this point. Never had any big scores and now I’ve got a major blowout. Still, I’ll make do. The one thing that we’re always short of is people who know how to fix things. God! Who would have thought in the romantic days of interstellar colonies we’d be an economic basket case slowly breaking down? One of these days, or years, or decades, we won’t be able to fix it anymore. When the machines die and can no longer be fixed, people like me will still be around making do. Sark? He’s muscle. Even in the age of machines you need occasional muscle. He’ll make do as well, as somebody’s personal bodyguard or in some private army someplace. Lucky’ll wind up crop-dusting some dirtball, and people like An Li always seem to come out smelling like a rose sooner or later. What about you?”

She sighed. “Going over my notes here. I’ve got enough to keep them going in academia for a while here, from biology to philosophy. I’m the only known human being who ever had any sort of conversation with an alien intelligence, at least as far as we know. That should be good for a position in some minor department someplace, lecturing on the rights and wrongs of containment and whether or not it’s really true that you can’t have a dialogue with a unified intelligence. It’ll drive me nuts after a while, but it’ll be good for eating and sleeping money for a couple of years, anyway. At least it’s Li who’ll have to face the Kajanis, anyway. Better her than me, and she sure as hell deserves it. We’re just the hired help.”