This week's prompt is from gene gazer with 'spaceship racing', so enjoy a short story about the aftermath of a particular race. Enjoy!
~
Salvage:
“All right,” Captain Piel said, standing up from his chair as the last washes of radiation dissipated from Crazy Eight’s hull. “Now that we’re here, I can let you all know what the mission is.”
His first officer, Gabby Corling, a weathered woman in her late forties, looked up from her position at the helm. Normally she handled sensors and comms, but only she and Piel knew about their most recent job, and for the last leg of this flight she’d taken personal control of navigation. She’d used to first officer on a luxury cruise line until her dismissal for certain ethical violations. Piel himself had been dropped out of the Centauri Royal Navy’s officer corps for conduct unbecoming. All of the mercenary band had baggage of one kind or another.
“So what’s the job?” Derrick van Pech, lieutenant, gunnery officer and third in command of Crazy Eight. He was in his late twenties and presented a laconic and lackadaisical air to the outside world, belying the disturbing coldness behind it. Among the rest of the crew, he only got really along with Splice. He still had a lot to learn about the business, but there was no denying that he was a natural officer, with sharp instincts that had saved the crew more than once, but Piel still didn’t like him. Van Pech wasn’t even looking up as he asked the question, his eyes were on the displays.
“Yeah,” Valentine ‘Stripes’ Santos demanded, turning in his chair. The helmsman was a ladies’ man and influencer. He’d been a very handsome man once. He was still attractive now, but in a different way. His face, lower arms and legs (and, he’d smirkingly bragged, elsewhere) had been rebuilt into that of a tiger – or at least as close to one as the human form allowed. His wasn’t the most extreme cosmetic override Piel had ever seen, but it was one of the best. Stripes had a lot of money, but he liked playing pirate for his fans. He also liked staying mobile for the times he got a little too rough with his playmates and needed to lay low. “You’ve been playing this one awfully close to the chest.”
“Get everyone together,” Piel said. “We’ll talk then.”
~
It didn’t take long. The Crazy Eight mercenary band lived up to their name; eight men and women willing to do dirty deeds that others didn’t want to soil their hands with, but those deeds didn’t come cheap. Despite their name, Piel had fostered a reputation for quality – and just as important, discrete – service. If you wanted something done, you threw a coin into a merc bar and hired whoever snatched it up. If you wanted it done well, you called on the Eight.
Perkins and al-Hadid came up from Engineering, Foster grumbled her way out of Medical and Splice arrived from wherever she went when they didn’t need the little freak. She stared at Piel, her breath clicking slowly through her respirator. She didn’t even need it.
“We’ve got a job,” the captain began. They all knew that, but this was a reminder that what they were doing, they weren’t doing just on a whim of his. “A very high-paying job. Set-for-the-next-three-years kind of pay.”
There were some appreciative sounds at that. “But there’s a reason you didn’t want to share any details until we were in-system,” van Pech noted. “We’re in Dromedary, aren’t we?”
Piel suppressed a curse. He should have known van Pech would figure things out, but even he got taken in by the younger man’s facade from time to time. “Yes,” he admitted. “This is Dromedary. And before you ask, yes – we’re going to Atacama.”
That caused an even bigger stir. Perkins was the first to speak. “Not begging any pardon whatsoever, skip – but what the fuck? Have you lost your God-damn mind?”
“According to my discharge psych eval, pretty near,” the captain answered. “Atacama, ladies and gents.” He brought up a hologram of the world. An otherwise habitable world locked in the grip of a global ice age. What few parts of the planet weren’t covered by ice were cold deserts and savannahs. It was known for its stark beauty, severe weather, massive glaciers and vast ice caverns.
In part due to that same severe climate, Atacama had never been settled. It’s largest claim to fame was its selection as the final hurdle in the thirtieth anniversary of the Five-Star Grand Prix, an interstellar race that started on Earth, crossed four other systems and ended in orbit of Atacama. The Five-Star had been the biggest, most complex and most dangerous race in the Earth Sphere. It wasn’t just about getting from point A to B; there were obstacles to clear. Atmospheric runs, FTL jumps, literal hoops to fly through. There were a hundred markers across five systems and each one had to be completed. Some were as easy as flying by. Others required a bit more work before you could proceed. The very last leg of the race was a run through Atacama’s ice caverns and then a final high-G ascent to the finish line in orbit. The Five-Star put every part of a pilot’s skills to the test: reflexes, void travel and FTL calculations, atmospheric maneuvering and even technical operations. There was nothing like it across the dozens of worlds humanity had colonized and conquered.
At least, there hadn’t been.
Twenty years ago on that last leg of the race, two challengers were neck and neck. Geoffry ‘Rush’ Namsung and Norman ‘G-force’ O’Cullen. Longtime rivals, they’d been trading first place back and forth for the third of the run. Namsung hit Atacama’s atmosphere, disappearing into the ice caverns with O’Cullen hard on his tail... and they never came back up.
A third of the way through the glacial canyons, the race camera feeds cut out. At first, the viewers thought this was deliberate, a way to heighten the tension until the pilots came shrieking up straight towards the finish line, hulls blazing with light as the two long-time rivals put their all into the very final stretch, where fractions of a second were all that mattered between victory and defeat.
...but neither craft came out.
Fearing a crash, a rescue ship was immediately sent. It too went into the dead zone and all contact with it was lost. Several other racers had arrived by this time, so the race officials had to put them on hold, sending a larger support ship in to extract what they now feared were multiple casualties. That vessel never returned, either but eight hours after it entered the caverns, a large portion of the ice field collapsed. Some would later claim that the resultant thermal and radiation readings were very similar to what would be expected from a critical breach of a civilian-grade reactor, but this was dismissed by official reports.
All race participants were immediately re-routed directly to the finish line in orbit of Atacama while a larger rescue expedition was mounted. A Royal Navy cutter landed on the glacier’s surface, sending a ground team into the caverns via fissures in the ice. After two days, one survivor emerged. The official story was that the caverns had become highly unstable due to rapid melting caused by the opening of a magma vent, weakening the ice and causing multiple cave-ins. Both pilots and everyone from the previous rescue expeditions was declared dead.
With bad press and lawsuits from the families of the dead pilots and rescue personnel, the Five-Stars Grand Prix went bankrupt and shuttered. Over the years, a number of private missions had been launched to recover bodies, keepsakes or even the extremely expensive and valuable racecraft belonging to Namsung and O’Cullen. Those that didn’t fail were never heard from again, their fates written off as just more casualties called by collapsing ice and rock. Though no one would admit to taking bad luck and superstition seriously, colonization plans for the planet and even forays into the system itself started to dry up, often killed behind the scenes for vague or nebulous reasons.
For twenty years, very few people had visited Dromedary’s twin suns except for wildcat miners, pirates hiding from naval patrols and those chasing the mystery of Atacama’s caverns. The world had gathered such a reputation that in bars and meetings among those who considered themselves in the know, it was also known as ‘Rainbow Valley’, or just ‘Rainbow’, a reference to a location on Earth’s Mt. Everest where the bodies of several mountaineers, all dressed in bright clothes, once lay.
“Are you stupid?” Doctor Foster demanded. “That planet’s a death trap. Extreme weather, plunges to lethal temperature in seconds. Its ozone is thin, so we have increased radiation from the stars. There’s a reason why no one tried to set up shop there even before all that shit with the race.”
“Myself and commander Corling have studied the history quite extensively, doctor. We’re familiar with the territory.”
“Well, bully for you and Gabby. The race surveyors had charted every inch of those caverns and it didn’t stop the ceiling from coming down and burying a lot of dumb fucks alive now did it?”
“We’re not just going off old maps, Forty,” Gabby put in. The doctor’s eyes narrowed. She hated that nickname. “Our client has something else.” She pressed a few buttons on the console and then, on the slowly-turning holographic world, a red dot appeared. It pulsed slowly, as, half-buried beneath crackling static, a rising and falling series of tones filling the cabin. Everyone recognized it immediately. It was a locator beacon from a starship’s black box.
“That beacon was picked up about two weeks ago by vessel passing through Dromedary,” Corling explained. “Buried in the signal is the ID code from Geoffry Rush’s beacon. That information made its way to our client, and plans for an investigation were immediately launched. The crew of that ship were offered the same opportunity as we’re being given, but turned it down. So our clients decided to explore alternative avenues. That’s where we came in. That signal was never recorded during any of the rescue operations. They want to know why it’s active now, and they’re willing to pay a lot of money to find out.”
“And of course they couldn’t go themselves,” Perkins grunted. “Now could they?”
“Our clients pointed out that they weren’t the only people that the freighter crew shared this discovery with,” Piel told him. “Atacama is one of the biggest mysteries of our age and whoever gets there first will be the one in the history books. They’re worried that other parties are launching their own investigation and they want someone who can provide security and surety to their claim.” His expression hardened. “This isn’t a debate. We’re going there. We’re going to find that beacon and we’re going to make sure no one else gets their grubby hands on it. Understood?”
“Yes, sir,” The engineer grumbled. “Whatever you say, sir.”
“Good. Our clients can have their names in the history books. We’re just here for the money, and that’s all we need. The past doesn’t matter. Here and now is what we’re doing to deal with, and that’s what we always succeed at, don’t we?”