But we don’t know if he’s been in worse situations, because we don’t know exactly what happened to the Gabriella.
What we do know is this:
On the Tuesday after launch, Ferguson contacts Naomi Ruhl of the Angelina, asking if she’ll be in the vicinity of Madreperla on Friday.
I’m thinking we need a few ships to back us up, he says. We’ll pay for the time you take away from your core mission. Not a lot, mind you, but enough for peace of mind.
“If he had really needed extra ships, he would have asked me on Sunday,” she says now. “I saw him. I even shared some of that skunky beer with him outside the Elizabeta. We talked about our upcoming trips, as best we could without giving away too many secrets, and he seemed confident, maybe overly so. But the man I talked to two days later wasn’t confident at all. I asked him what changed, and he said nothing, really. It was just that he’d been thinking about other ships that had gone to Madreperla, and the ones that survived had sister ships in the vicinity.”
The Angelina isn’t a sister ship. She doesn’t have the infinity build. She’s not a former military vehicle. She’s a long-haul cargo ship without a lot of maneuverability.
That Ferguson called her a sister ship seems odd. Perhaps he felt a kinship to her captain. Or perhaps he saw all private vessels as sister ships.
Nothing in the record clarifies that, and neither does anything in Ferguson’s conversation with Naomi.
At the moment of the conversation, the Angelina has a choice of two routes, one that will take her closer to Madreperla. But Naomi worries that her definition of close is different from his.
She asks him to clarify what he wants.
You know the history of Nájar Crater, he says. If we run into difficulty, I want to know that someone can reach us relatively quickly.
She’s never heard him sound this nervous before, nor has she ever heard him ask for help. The Gabriella has been in tight spots before. Once she limped back to Ochoa with half a working engine and, rumor has it, short most of the ammunition needed to run the weapons systems.
That crew wouldn’t talk about what happened, although one crew member—not Ferguson—told Naomi that they had nearly died out there.
When Naomi asked Ferguson about it weeks later, he laughed that story off and said his people exaggerated. That was always his response when it seemed that the Gabriella had gotten into situations that spiraled out of control.
We made it through, he said to anyone who asked. We were fine. Sometimes people exaggerate.
And sometimes people understate what they have gone through. Ferguson is known for understatement. Early in his career, he had his crew sign nondisclosure agreements before they could board not, they say, because he was handling confidential materials, but because he didn’t like gossip or rumor surrounding any of his trips.
Over time, he dropped that requirement, but he still preferred crew members who tended toward silence. Even Corey Burfet, who loved a good story, never told one about his journeys on the Gabriella.
When asked—and Belinda asked a lot—Corey would say that of all the ships he served on the Gabriella was the calmest, the easiest, and the least prone to disaster.
But Naomi Ruhl believes that Ferguson was sensing disaster early in the journey to Nájar Crater.
“Not the kind of disaster that would make him turn around,” she says. “But enough of one to make him more cautious than usual.”
She is not the only captain he contacted that Tuesday.
Mercedes LaCoste of the Selena says she heard from him as well.
“He sounded almost angry,” she said. “As if he didn’t want to be talking to me. He demanded to know where the Selena was and what our heading was. I normally wouldn’t have told him, but I’d already heard about the journey to Nájar Crater, so I knew we were on a different mission. I gave him our coordinates, and he cursed. When I asked him what was wrong, he said we were just too far away.”
During that day of contacts, he also reaches Tomito Gerhardt, captain of the Decker. Gerhardt wouldn’t talk to me for this project, but according to his testimony at the very first inquest into the loss of the Gabriella, he said this:
Giles promised me twice our usual daily fee if I brought the Decker to Madreperla. He wanted me to remain within an hour’s range of the moon itself, but I wanted to see what he was doing. So I instructed our people to orbit Madreperla after the Gabriella went into the atmosphere.
It was a fateful decision for many reasons, one that resulted in Gerhardt losing his credentials. He now lives off his pension, which proved untouchable despite a series of lawsuits going after every bit of money he ever made.
The Decker is closer to Madreperla than the Gabriella is when Ferguson starts contacting other ships. In addition to Naomi Ruhl, Mercedes LaCoste, and Tomito Gerhardt, several other captains also receive requests from Ferguson. All of their ships are too far away.
Even if they weren’t, some of those captains might not have gone to Madreperla, no matter how much Ferguson offered to pay.
“He doesn’t speak to me for nearly five years, and suddenly he wants me to do him a favor?” Orion Newbawer, captain of the Vista, said. “I mean, I’m sorry he’s dead, but I don’t regret refusing him for one instant. Think about what happened to everyone who tried to help him. They’ve all been ruined. Maybe if he consulted with me before he left for Nájar Crater, I could’ve talked him out of it.”
Then Orion laughed without humor. He shakes his head.
“I’m delusional,” he said. “I couldn’t talk Giles out of anything. No one could. Not when he had his mind set on something.”
Some of the captains believe the journey to Nájar Crater was Ferguson’s idea, not a directive from W&D. Records are unclear on this. Nothing indicates who decided that an exploration of Nájar Crater would be both possible and lucrative.
“Giles did a lot of shady things,” Orion said. “Not many people will tell you that, because he’s dead, and because…”
His voice trailed off, but he looked at me, as if he expects me to understand.
“It was always about the money for him,” Orion said. “The money and being first. Being the one who actually conquered something everyone else believes is impossible. Sometimes we have to listen, you know? Sometimes we have to understand that everyone else has failed for a reason.”
He shook a finger at me, his voice rising.
“Smart captains don’t go near Nájar Crater, not after everything that’s happened there. Everyone pretends that Giles was a smart captain, but he never was. The trip to Nájar Crater was a suicide mission. And the tragedy is that he took others down with him.”