Nájar Crater is the largest crater on Madreperla. Indeed, Nájar Crater is one of the largest craters in the solar system. For centuries, scientists have assumed that Nájar Crater is an impact crater, that something hurtling at a great deal of speed hit the ground with an incredible amount of force.
But geologists and others question that idea. The presence of a mountain range around the gigantic hole in the ground suggests that the crater might have been formed during a volcanic eruption or several eruptions.
The rock around the crater isn’t lava rock as we know it, and there seems to be no volcanic activity on Madreperla. Some believe there never was volcanic activity.
It should be easy enough to study, those geologists tell me, if only a ship could land nearby. But every time a ship tries, a maelstrom comes, sometimes small, sometimes large.
Scans provide the basis for the theories, and scans are a bit inconclusive. There are blind spots around the crater, depending on where the scanning equipment is.
From equipment based on Ius Prime, the scans can’t read the crater at all. The mountain range seems to be one long series of mountains, with a slight valley where the crater actually is.
That reading remains for ships outside Madreperla’s orbit. But once ships enter Madreperla’s orbit, they can scan and map the mountains and the exterior of the crater itself.
Those scans show a crater that’s at least 10 miles deep and 500 miles wide. There is a bit of a flat area all the way around the crater, and then the ground rises up, forming the various mountains, all of which are incredibly steep and pointed. Young mountains, the geologists guess, although they’re unable to get close enough to study them, either.
Ships that venture into the large area above the crater have started scans, which is how we know about the water, about the minerals, about the possibility of riches.
But those ships have been unable to complete their scans. A few of the ships dropped probes into the water, and that always starts a reaction. The probes do get some readings, however, and those readings are also woefully incomplete.
The water seems denser than we expect, and in addition to its mineral content, has the kind of natural nutritional content that most ships usually add to their own water supply artificially. The kind of content that keeps an entire crew of a starship healthy on a very long voyage.
The probes send back information until the maelstrom starts, and then the probes cease to communicate. None seems to make it more than a quarter mile down, although one started pinging the depth of the crater the moment the probe hit the water, and that’s where we get the depth measurement.
That probe was getting readings that suggested the area it was pinging was 10 miles deep. But that doesn’t preclude deeper areas in other parts of the crater, or shallower areas there as well.
“Sometimes I believe the only reason we’re interested in the Nájar Crater is because we can’t easily get information about it,” says Lev Kevershaw, an astrogeologist who has spent his entire career at Prime University studying anomalies in this sector. “We usually have too much information. With Nájar Crater, we have just enough to be tantalizing, but not enough for us to make any conclusive determinations about what it is, what caused it or why it’s there. And then there are the storms, if you want to call them that.”
Storms is not a word that most scientists use lightly. Storms are natural phenomena that occur because of atmospheric conditions unique to a particular planet or moon.
No other location on Madreperla has this kind of activity. And, as Imelda pointed out, these storms are predictable. Every single dropped probe caused a maelstrom. Every single ship that got too close to the crater itself got enveloped in a maelstrom.
Atmospheric conditions for all of these events were different.
But mountains create their own weather, or at least they do on large planets like Ius Prime, and some meteorologists as well as astrogeologists claim that the same sort of phenomenon is going on here.
Whatever the cause, though, the idea of a ship heading to Madreperla to probe the Nájar Crater sounds like a date with disaster.
Yet W&D managed to get insurance for the voyage. The Gabriella’s insurance paid out survivor benefits to each crewmember’s family, something that an insurance company would not have done if they deemed the journey reckless.
Beta Linde claims that Ferguson and his crew had a new plan of attack for the crater. She believes they were going to approach fact-finding in a new way—or rather, she says, a new old-fashioned way.
“Giles believed it was tech that activated the maelstroms. No ship went into that area without scanning the area first. He thinks the scans activated something, and then the proximity of engines and other tech aggravated it, like some sort of defense,” she told me late one afternoon at the bar.
No one else was there, although I wish there were. I wanted to check to see if this sounded strange to other ears.
I thought it sounded like justification, but I did end up contacting Imelda afterwards.
“He mentioned something like that to me,” she told me, “but the research doesn’t bear it out. The ships that approached the crater are all different, made of different materials, and using different frequencies in their scans. The tech isn’t similar at all.”
That’s what I had found in the scientific treatises I’d located. I didn’t say so, though, not willing to change the direction of the conversation.
“Still,” she said, her tone musing, “something convinced the insurance companies that this particular trip was viable. Something made them think this trip did not have the same risk that a trip to Nájar Crater usually has.”
I asked her if she believes that Ferguson found a way to beat the crater.
“Clearly he didn’t,” she said. “The entire lost ship tells us that. But did others think he had a way? Maybe. He convinced someone. Because insurance companies do their best to deny payouts, and they granted the payouts fast in this particular instance.”
They did. That’s one of the mysteries of the Gabriella. Survivors from other lost ships usually have to wait the five years required by law to receive any benefits at all.
While it took five years to declare the crew dead and thus release their estates, the insurance companies waived the right to wait, and sent survivors benefits immediately. They didn’t even include the documents usually sent with an early release, saying that the money had to be returned should it turn out that the ship wasn’t lost after all.
When I contacted the insurance companies about this unusual change in policy, no representative would talk to me about any claims besides my own, citing privacy concerns. I got several survivors to waive the privacy claims, but the companies still wouldn’t talk to me, and the survivors eventually withdrew their support, afraid, they said, that they might lose their funding after all.
That money is important because it was, in many instances, the only money survivors received for their lost family members. Most lived on the edge, paying bills with each payout, never saving, and owning little more than the clothing on their backs.
The survivors usually had jobs, but the money that the crew member made was often the difference between living a financially solid existence, and living below the poverty line.
Many families had to leave Ochoa Star Port because they no longer had any connection to a ship. Even more families left Ciudad Orilla because it was much too expensive to live there on one salary.
And then there is the trauma of loss.
Belinda Pete told me she hasn’t slept well since word of the ship’s loss reached her. She doesn’t want to believe that Corey is dead, but she needs to believe it to claim death benefits.
She waited the full five years before filing a single claim, including insurance, and she still feels guilty about it.
“If I fall into a sound sleep,” she said, “I wake up within an hour, hearing his laugh. He says, Why’d you lose faith, Belinda? You know I been in worse situations than this one.”