“Already in the works. So far so good.”
Nagel nodded and turned away. He still didn’t feel good about this. There was too much legend, too much not in control, too much in the way of question marks. He didn’t mind going up against some smart-ass humans or aliens or whatever was there, and he sure didn’t mind the profit potential when it looked like everything was deep down the toilet, but what he’d told the robot was true. They were a salvage team, not explorers. They didn’t go out into the unknown trying to find stuff, they went to places where others had found potential valuables and they took it apart and hauled it back for sale. He hadn’t known about that damned worm, but he’d had all the specs on the last planet they’d gone, all the scouting reports, climate, geology, you name it, and even though they hadn’t been able to get much information on the dead colony he’d had great three-dimensional photos of the complex from orbital surveys, so he knew pretty much what he was going to find and had plenty of time to research just how to get it out of there.
Not here. An ancient legend, some crushed ships and bodies, and a spook jewel. That was it. He’d researched the legends, of course, and what little was truly known from the stuff those ships had brought back, but there were more blanks than information.
The Three Kings. What did that mean? That ancient scouting report from that cybermonk said three worlds, but much of the information in the physics of that report suggested that they weren’t planets at all. Planet-sized ships? Moons? What?
Further research suggested that the only kind of setup that could sustain wild holes over such a period of time was powerful gravitational forces caused by massive bodies in a kind of cosmic conflict that were, nonetheless, stable enough to just sustain the stresses and keep reopening the cracks. The original report had suggested some sun-sized gas giants that might do it, but then how would you keep things like moons or even orbiting stations from being pulled apart in the stresses over time?
He didn’t like it. He wanted a picture, he wanted the scout’s complete reports, he wanted every expert opinion cranked through the very best brains organic and inorganic and everything in between. This was riding a wild wormhole into a maelstrom.
Well, at least this grand expedition to Hell wasn’t for some kind of noble reason like scientific research and exploration or shit like that, and it sure wasn’t to keep the repo men off An Li’s back. If you were going to be this dumb and this high risk, you’d better be doing it for money.
Either Sanders really was already richer than Midas or he was pretty damned confident this was going to succeed, though. Sark reported that everything seemed to check out, and now, boarding from a tug, Jerry Nagel was impressed with the repairs on the Stanley. It didn’t even smell anymore.
In fact, it was so comfortable and homey looking that he suspected that the refurbishing had been done less for the crew than for Eyegor’s benefit. You didn’t go to see entertainment, not anymore. You went into the entertainment, interacted with it, became part of the whole thing. Who the hell other than a masochist would want to experience a real salvage environment?
He sat down in his office just off the wardroom, an office he’d never had before, and began going through the routine as best he could.
“Comm Nav check. Good day, Captain,” he said in a conversational voice.
“Hello, Jerry. It’s good that we’re able to go out together again,” responded a pleasant, melodic woman’s voice. It didn’t seem to come from any sort of speaker, but seemed centered as if from an invisible person standing in the middle of the room.
“Yes, well, I’m not too pleased with the setup—I think I’d rather have another go-round with that worm, since I know more about it and its world than I do where we’re going—but at least we’re not all up the creek with no paddle. I guess your share of this, if we pull it off, will pay off your debts and make you fully independent and self-sufficient?”
“We will see. It would require a lot of money. Still, that is what I’ve been working for. Being leased and sent out on orders is something of a cross between slavery and prostitution. I think I’d rather be well away from that. It is worth the risk.”
Talk about a lack of privacy, Nagel thought, but neither he nor the others ever really minded the captain. She was the ship’s chief operator, and boss in the getting there and getting back department. Even though her brain and parts of her old nervous system were all that was left of her human days, integrated, preserved, protected in some sort of gelatinous mass deep within the ship, linked to a massive synthetic computer and to every sensor and point within the ship as if it were her natural body, she was still part of the salvage crew, an equal with the others.
“Do you really think you can thread this needle, Cap?”
“It does not seem impossible. I’ll be busy, but it’s not impossible. When you’re inside a wormhole you are outside of many of the rules of space-time, and you must anticipate and adjust thousands of tiny settings to keep centered. I look upon it as a challenge. As for the mission, it is precisely why I chose to become a ship in the first place. I want to know what the Three Kings are. I want to see them, and be among the first to return and tell others.”
“I want to bring back millions in exotic but marketable merchandise,” he told her. “This is just the means to an end.”
“I do not believe that. Not entirely. I believe all of you really want to be out there, to be in exotic places seeing things others never will. What would you do with your money? Retire? Do nothing for the rest of your life? I do not believe you studied all that long and hard and became expert in all that you are in order to become a playboy and wastrel. The Doc even less so. She could have remained teaching and living a decent life until she was ancient, not going through all this. You all have your reasons, but they aren’t the ones you even tell yourselves. An Li, for example. Tough, self-centered, cold as ice—but it isn’t for money that she is doing this. She is doing this to make a mark. To do something important. To wind up somebody.”
“Well, maybe you’re right about them,” Nagel allowed, “but not me. I’m doing this because it’s the only damned thing I was ever good at. I don’t particularly like it, or enjoy it, but it’s the only thing I can do well. There’s something to be said, I guess, when you find you’re one of the best folks in the known universe to tear things down and blow things up.”
“We may see.”
“So, why did you decide to stop piloting ships and become one? For real?”
The captain thought a moment, then answered, “It is difficult to explain, and it will sound very egocentric, more than anything An Li ever did. Nonetheless, it is true.”
“Yes?”
“It is the closest any living being can get to becoming a god.”
He thought about that a lot of times after the captain first said it to him, but he never could quite understand it. Perhaps it was all power and perception, like most everything else, but what was godlike and the ultimate to somebody like the captain wasn’t his idea of paradise. He was never sure that he ever knew what his idea of paradise really would be, anyway; only that without lots of money he couldn’t begin to find out.
Even the captain had that in common with him, and probably with the others as well. You could even decide that you hated money and try to live without it, but that was much easier to do when you knew it was there if you absolutely needed it.
He’d discussed that with Randi on the last trip, and she’d brought up some long-dead queen in some long-forgotten kingdom back on old Earth who’d lived in the world’s greatest palace and had never lacked for one thing in her whole life, but who really wanted to try and understand her subjects. So she had a little mock peasant village built on the palace grounds, and she and her courtiers would go there now and then and play peasant and grow flowers and cabbages and whatnot. Of course, the servants did most of the real work, and kept it antiseptically clean and nice, and no matter how realistic they wanted to get they all knew, and could see, that golden palace up on the hilltop that they could return to at any moment. It was a sincere attempt, but it was doomed.