Allen Steele - The Great Galactic Ghoul

1504 GMT 8/16/62 CODE A1/0679

“As soon as I saw this,” Lesley Zimmerman says, “I knew we were going in. There’s a lot of ships between Earth and Mars, but chances were that we’d be the nearest one.” A quick check of the chart board confirmed this; although there were two other spacecraft presently operating within that sector, Gold Dust Woman was the closest ship to Eros.

There was never any question of whether the Woman would undertake the rescue effort. Regardless of the fact that the Woman was a TBSA freighter and the Explorer was a Pax Astra mining rig, it had always been understood among spacers that one ship always came to the assistance of another in times of emergency; international space law only codified what was already a long-standing practice that had been carried over from Earth’s maritime traditions. A few years earlier, officials from the Pax and TBSA had met to discuss forming a dedicated search and rescue team that would be on permanent standby for just such emergencies, yet both sides soon realized that the inherent difficulties were too much to overcome. Even in the inner system, the distances are just too vast for a SAR ship to be able to respond to a mayday in time for it to do any good. That, and the expense of maintaining crews and vessels which would do nothing but wait for emergencies meant that the proposal was impractical. Ultimately, both sides agreed to simply continue what they’d been doing before: overlook their rivalry in crisis situations, and come to each other’s aid no matter what.

So while Lesley began plotting a trajectory that would take the Woman to 433 Eros, Henry and Ko began prepping the ship for a course-correction burn. Once the captain was sure that his crew wasn’t having any problems of their own, he got on the radio and attempted to make contact with the Ritchie Explorer . His sense of foreboding grew when he received no response to either voice or text messages.

“That was when I knew that things were really bad,” Captain Zimmerman later told the TBSA board of inquiry. “According to the registry, there were six people aboard. When none of them can apparently make it to the wireless, you know there’s serious trouble. And when their comp does nothing more than repeat the same preset message over and over again, then it’s clear that they’re in deep.”

There was one piece of luck: Eros was only about one and a quarter million miles from the Woman ’s present position. Once Henry and Ko worked out the logistics, they estimated that if they used most of the fuel reserves and ran the engine at maximum capacity, the Woman should be able to reach the asteroid in a little more than four days. This might seem like a long time, but by interplanetary standards it was a quick jaunt. The other two ships in the vicinity—the TBSA Martian Pride , another freighter, and the PASS Ulysses , an exploration ship outbound for the Jovian system—were seven and nine days away respectively, and although the Pride ’s captain offered to assist the Woman , the other freighter was nearly out of range. Henry thanked the Pride , but told its captain that he and his crew could handle the problem themselves.

“I was wrong,” Henry would say later. “The situation was beyond us. I just didn’t know it then.”

Eros is somewhat unusual. Not part of the main belt, its highly elliptical orbit brings it as close as .15 AU to Earth during its 1.76-year solar period; during this time, it crosses the orbit of Mars twice, therefore occasionally making it both a near-Earth and a near-Mars asteroid. In 1999, the NASA probe NEAR Shoemaker orbited the rock several times, sending back the first close-up photos of a major asteroid, before crash-landing on its surface. Because of this, more was known about 433 Eros than any other transient body until the beginning of asteroid mining operations.

Despite its proximity to both Earth and Mars, though, it wasn’t until fairly recently that anyone claimed a stake on Eros. And for good reason: since type-S stony asteroids are chiefly comprised of rock, they’re considered less valuable than either type-C carbonaceous chondrites or type-M metallics, which offer resources of volatiles and precious metals. Eros may have been easier to reach, but it didn’t seem to offer enough to attract the attention of a profit-minded mining consortium.

This changed once the more valuable main-belt asteroids were gradually claimed by one TBSA consortium or another, thereby locking out competitors from the Pax Astra. When that happened, Pax prospectors began shifting through old astrogeological data, seeing if perhaps there may be anything that had been overlooked… and that was when it was found that NEAR Shoemaker had detected large surface deposits of olivine and pyroxene, along with the possible presence of iron sulfide and iron-nickel. Eros wasn’t a bonanza, but neither was it worthless; the fact that it was close to Earth made a stake by Pax consortium a feasibly profitable venture, if they were willing to invest in a mining rig and crew.

Four days after the Gold Dust Woman received the mayday from the Ritchie Explorer , the freighter came within visual range of the asteroid. Thirteen miles long and eight miles wide, Eros looks vaguely like an Idaho potato from which someone has taken a bite; at its midsection is a deep, scalloped depression, less like a crater than a gorge, from when it had apparently broken away from a larger asteroid countless years ago. Called Himeros, this was where the Explorer had anchored itself.

Asteroid mining rigs such as the Ritchie Explorer are called ships only because they have engines that enable them to move from one place to another. Other than that, they’re more like spacefaring versions of the offshore oil platforms that used to line the coasts of Earth’s oceans. About 70,000 tons in dry Earth-weight, the Explorer was an ugly, dust-covered hulk half-hidden by conduits, pipes, storage tanks, antennas, and cranes, with three fusion engines at one end and a hemispherical command module at its midsection. Eros was in its winter season, with the asteroid’s slow, end-over-end tumble on its spin axis causing Him-eros to face away from the Sun, so the rig could only be seen by its red and green formation lights.

As the Gold Dust Woman approached Eros, Henry Zimmerman repeated his radio calls, continually hailing the Explorer while Lesley fired maneuvering thrusters to bring the freighter alongside the asteroid and match spins with it. As before, there was no response… and when the Woman finally achieved a parallel position about 2,000 feet above Himeros, its crew saw why.

“It looked like a bomb had gone off down there,” Henry says. “The command module dome was almost completely blown away. It was like…” He pauses, thinking of a way to describe it. “If you made a bowl out of aluminum foil, turned it upside-down, then lit a firecracker underneath it… that’s what you’d get.”

“The moment I saw that,” Ko says, “I knew this wasn’t a rescue mission anymore. We were just going in there to find the bodies. There was no way anyone could have lived through whatever happened down there.”

Nevertheless, Captain Zimmerman proceeded as if lives were at stake and the clock was ticking. According to the database, the rig’s six-person crew was an extended family, three married couples who’d joined together to form a clan under a common surname. This practice is not unusual aboard Pax deep-space vessels; quite often, the clans are also the consortiums that own and operate their ships. In this instance, the Owlsley clan was listed as being the owner-operators of the Ritchie Explorer : David and Kathryn Dolan-Owlsley, the captain and first mate respectively; Sean and Clay Connor-Owlsley, the chief engineer and operations manager; and Keith and Jane Wetherill-Owlsley, both surface-operations technicians. According to their profiles, all were experienced spacers; it was possible that a few might have survived in some airtight compartment out of reach from the long-range com.