Free The Salvagers by John Michael Godier Page A

responded. Those rooms were of little importance to my goals that night. It was late, and we needed to move on and see the gold. We reached the door to the hold a short time later. Unlike doors elsewhere on the ship, this one was closed tight.
                  "We'll have to crank it open by hand. Stand back," I warned. It was well worth playing it safe. If the hold was still pressurized, the escaping air would be powerful and might carry debris, possibly even gold bars that could shatter a space helmet. It wouldn't be the first time that happened. A salvage crew was sent to retrieve a capsule left by the fifteenth manned mission to Mars, abandoned nearly four centuries ago. Everyone assumed its pressurization wouldn't have held up that long, but when they popped the hatch it blew plastic shards from a broken computer screen straight into a man's space suit, killing him. I wasn't going to take that chance, even if it was one in a million.
                  I stood to the side of the door and cranked the manual release. There was no rushing air, and the compartment door slid open easily. Then came that sudden flush of excitement you feel in your chest when something truly wonderful is about to happen. We must have moved faster than at any other time in our exploration that day to get ourselves inside that hold and shine our tiny lights on the cargo. We were not disappointed.
                  "It's still here!" I said, as both of my companions were struck speechless.
                  Row after row of gold bars flashed brilliantly in our miner's lights. It was more than a bank vault, it was a royal treasury. I'd never seen anything like it, even in old pictures of Fort Knox. The bars were stacked neatly, strapped to metal pallets across the forward quarter of the hold.
                  "We're so . . . rich," Neil said.
                  "And I thought my grandchildren would still be paying off the loan for my degree," Sanjay remarked.
                  I did some quick math in my head. Even after dividing it into shares, I was now one of the wealthiest men in the UNAG. We stayed for half an hour marvelling at the magnitude of the haul. We were looking at the fabled treasure of the Cape Hatteras . Fairytales were told to children about it. I'd bet every salvager in the solar system started their career specifically to look for it, and I was the one who had bagged it.
                  "It's late," I said. "We need to move on. Everyone's waiting for us, and we need to get back to the salvor and come up with a plan for tommorrow."
                  It was hard to stop staring, but when we finally moved on we ran into a problem: the doors to the engine room were welded shut from the inside. To go through them, we'd have had to cut our way in, and we weren't prepared for that. The path across the hold was blocked by a large mass of stowed mining gear, so we were left to return the way we had come until we found one of the transverse corridors.
                  "It's not unusual to weld a door shut if you don't need it. They had two and may have decided to install additional equipment and needed the extra wall space," I said.
                  "Is it possible the crew welded themselves into the engineering compartment to save themselves? Would there be any advantage to doing that?" Sanjay asked with a slight hint of India in his speech that I hadn't detected before. I suspected he was nervous.
                  "Well, the walls on ships are usually built thicker in the engine room in case something explodes, but it's probably no more airtight than the rest of the doors. It's just armored," Neil said.
                  I didn't think the crew would be in engineering either. It didn't seem like the place you'd go to spend your last moments. When you're losing your air, you don't need propulsion; you need