Samuels let out a whistle of breath.
A Quindar tone erupted from the room speakers.
“Ceres Control to Ulysses. We await your arrival.” End tone.
Cal looked at Zuoren.
“Well, what does that mean?” the doctor asked, looking from face to face.
They requested and waited for clarification but none came.
Chapter Four
They approached Ceres backwards, the main engine blasting nearly all of their remaining hydrogen against their direction of travel, slowing down enough to be captured by the shallow gravity and swung into orbit. Throughout it all, there was absolutely no response from Ceres Control.
The ship pitched over, and Cal watched the worldlet turn beneath them. A sphere of sparkling whites and blues amidst bone-dry seas rippled with brown clay and gray rock. No one on the Ulysses had ever seen Ceres before—relatively few human beings had with their own eyes. It should have been a sight of wonder and fascination. It was not.
From across the space of the command module, or staring out at him through the video chat windows encrusting the edges of his command display, his crew looked at him with grave expectation. He maintained on his face a mask of calm, or at least he hoped he did. He was prepared for challenges, but this was not the type he expected to face. Like many who chose life in space, Cal sought to escape certain aspects of life on Earth like politics and greed and the whiplash changes in culture.
Spacers dreamt that Space was clean.
But it wasn’t.
“Inez.” Cal had only to say that word and the comms officer began transmitting. A few hundred miles below them, on that perfectly round ball of clay, rock, and ice, Ceres Control would instantly hear his words.
If they were listening.
“Ulysses to Ceres Control. We have achieved orbit.” He motioned for an end tone and twisted his ring.
No response.
Chapter Five
Ceres Control was housed inside a turret jutting out to one side of the mining facility’s main native-G structure. Like all surface installations on the planetoid, it was tethered to the ground by endless lengths of resin-coated straps, anchored with pitons that were drilled through the icy dirt and clay and into bedrock for stability in the feeble gravitation. In normal daily operations, the collective physical motion of the humans and machines inside caused the entire massive structure to strain against the straps, creaking and moaning in vibration like an ancient wooden sailing vessel.
The control room on the inside of the turret was, like nearly every room in the facility, painted a cheerful color. A bright sky blue in this case.
Into the control room half-floated the person who had originally ordered the control room to be painted blue, Helen Donovan. Donovan was the facility’s Psychology Chief; sustaining the mental health of the most isolated population of human beings in all of history fell squarely upon her shoulders. It was a choice appointment. A job that she had fought and sacrificed in order to get—but previous to recent developments, she had been contemplating resignation and searching for ways to get herself back to Earth.
She lazily regarded the communications officer on duty: Alan Wu, member of one of the more influential family groups that populated the mining colony. He impatiently tapped his finger around a mechanical keyboard set within the communications console, an anomaly in a room dominated by touchscreens. The Wu’s stake of shares was one of the largest in the colony, and as such, it would be unwise to direct much of her ire upon him. The man standing next to him, anchoring himself against the slight gravity, was a different story entirely. Arno Laskey held high position in the newly shaken-up hierarchy, but he did not belong to one of the major families, and so his influence, though considerable, began and ended with him. The third person in the room, seated at the station toward the rear of the comms console, and who didn’t bother to look up from her screens to say hello, was Anita El Maz, another scion of what they were now calling the Great Families. Donovan held her intelligence in high esteem but not her spine. In all cases, El Maz would move with the herd.
El Maz, still without moving her eyes from the screen, spoke to her. “They’re here.”
“I see that.”
Laskey turned to his side, allowing Donovan space to lean in and peer at the displays.
“Have we responded to them yet?”
As if in answer, the comms system beeped, and a voice from the newly arrived Earth ship came over the speakers: “Ceres Control. Why won’t you answer?”
Laskey looked at Donovan. “Anschloss, Kravitz, and the others agreed that we would not communicate with them after acknowledging that we’d failed to keep them from coming here. We continue to go back and forth with the mother companies through the UN, but despite our refusal of increased shares, they undoubtedly think we are going to back down.”
“And now, with the Ulysses in orbit, they’re sure we’ll back down,” Wu said, as if he knew the inner thoughts of the board of the twelve companies rather than the thoughts his own mother and father had most recently espoused.
Donovan suppressed a sneer. “I told you we should never have let them come here. The public pressure is going to begin to build for us to resupply them. You’ve allowed them to position us as the bad guys. We should have shot them down when they were millions of miles away.”
“That would never have been as easy as you think it would have been,” Laskey said.
“Nonsense,” Donovan said. “All we had to do was tell them we were sending the tankers, and then right before they were to retrieve them with their robot arm, we could have set the tankers into a spin. They’d never have been able to grab them. The tankers would have collided with the Ulysses, destroying or crippling it, and we’d have avoided all of this.”
“We’d have been murderers,” El Maz said.
“You think we aren’t going to end up having blood on our hands by the end of this?” Donovan retorted. “We are either going to have to give them what they ask for and be proven impotent or we are going to have to kill them one way or another. Either by letting them starve or suffocate or sending a tanker up as a missile. But now, it’s just worse. Any accident we contrive is going to appear much more suspect.”
The pocket door behind Donovan opened. Base Commander Henry stepped in. Reflections from the LED lamps made his dark, bald head shine as if it was filled with stars.
“You’re wrong, Helen,” Henry said, standing with his hands on his hips like some cartoon hero. “Cal Scott is in command of that ship. When he finds out what we are up to, he might just join us for the sheer adventure of it.” He beamed a smile at his co-conspirators.
Donovan didn’t bother to hide her disagreement. “Bart, you don’t know Calvin Scott. You think you do, but you don’t.” She looked back at the other three to make sure they were listening to her. “We lost any chance of gaining Scott’s sympathies the moment we refused him and put the lives and goals of his crew at risk. He’d never listen to us now, and under no circumstance can you let him come down here.”
Wu laughed.
Donovan ignored him. “Either give him what he wants and look for another fight to pick or shoot them down right now. If you let him see what we are up to, then you risk everything we’ve worked for.”
Henry’s smile didn’t waver. He spoke more to the others than to Donovan, looking to blunt the force her conviction may have had on any of them. “Listen, either they join us or we starve them out. Sooner or later, they will be gasping for breath or weak from hunger, and then we send up a relief lander—and we grab the ship.” Returning his gaze to Donovan, he said, “Helen . . . what can he possibly do to stop us? What you think is a setback is actually a fantastic opportunity.”
Donovan knew she’d lost the room, but she couldn’t keep her mouth shut. She pointed at the image of the interplanetary ship on the large monitor.
“I’m telling you; Calvin Scott is trouble.”
Chapter Six
“N
othing from the surface,” Inez said. Telescopic images of the ice-dusty world reeled across the monitors as the planetoid itself rolled spectacularly outside the windows that straddled the command module’s instrument cluster. Ceres was haloed in a fog of sublimated ice, faint snowstorms of flash frozen gas sparkled as they fell back to the ground. Geysers ejected plumes of particulates generated by geologic processes that, despite a decade of mining and harvesting, were still not fully understood.
“Not much of a welcome,” Cal said.
“Clearly there is a power struggle occurring between Ceres and the mother companies but for them to go silent with us like this is more than disturbing,” Xu said. “We’ve got to do something to break this impasse before our oxygen and fuel levels deteriorate further.”
“I agree.” This from Samuels. “We’re fine on electricity, but we’ll need a certain amount of propellant just to maintain orbit.”
“How long will our air supply last?” Cal asked.
“We’ve got at least five days at this point, give or take,” Arthor said, bobbing at the back of the crowded module.
“I’ll go down and talk to them,” Cal said. There was actually nothing that he would rather do less than go down into that hive of uncertainty and possible hostility to argue for what should not have to be argued, but he knew it had to be done.
“Just you?”
“Just me.” In truth, again, he would rather have had company, but he knew it was unwise. “If there’s more going on down there than we realize, or if I am detained for some reason, I want enough hands to operate the ship and still have options.”
“You’ll have our lander, and we’ll be damn low on gas, what options will we have?” Samuels asked.
“I’m not going to take our lander. It’s too heavy, and it would require too much of our already limited fuel.” Cal reached out and scrolled the main display. The projected surface of Ceres zoomed away and refocused on an object in orbit beneath them, glittering in the faint rays of the sun.
“The colony’s taxi lander?” Arthor asked.
“Excellent idea,” Xu said. “It’s in cryo-parking mode, left in orbit after the last research team departed and awaiting the arrival of the next.”
Arthor brought his hand to his chin. “We could snag it and top off its tanks. It’s tiny. A taxi only carries enough fuel for a single up or down trip anyway. That won’t be much given Ceres’s weak gravity.”
“It’s orbiting about fifty miles beneath us,” Cal said. They had brought Ulysses in at as high an orbit as they could to preserve as much of its hard-won momentum as possible. The greater the speed, the higher the orbit and the longer it took for a spacecraft to circle any celestial body. It was a paradox that the slower the speed, the lower, and therefore faster in relation to any point on the surface, your orbit. They’d need to slow the Ulysses to drop lower, and therefore speed up, in order to catch the taxi lander.
“You’ll have to refuel down there, Cal. Or you’re not getting back up here,” the doctor said. “What if you can’t?”
“I’m going down there for our fuel. If I’m successful then surely they’ll fill up the taxi.”
“If not?” She tilted her head with the question.
“Ulysses in orbit puts pressure on them. Her commanding officer down there is more pressure. These are educated and intelligent people and their dispute is not with us. We’ll figure a way out of this and have Jupiter in front of us in no time.” Cal smiled, hoping they felt his optimism. They all answered him with smiles of their own. Except for the doctor. She didn’t allow herself to be fooled, and the look she gave him let him know it.
Chapter Seven
At the fore and aft of the Ulysses’s length, maneuvering thrusters flashed, pitching the ship into a spin, and pin-wheeling until the massive single bell of her main engine was again pointed directly into their direction of travel. The thrusters belched, arresting the motion.
Samuels touched a lit square on her command screen, and the great centrifuge slowed and stopped its spin. Another touch and the gigantic booms telescoped inward, retracting the habitats toward the hull. A dull thunk could be heard as tremendous clamps secured each hab against the motionless centrifuge hub. The habs would be without gravity for the duration of the capture of the taxi lander, but it was safer in the event of a mishap that sent the taxi spinning out of control: those massive, spinning booms would present too great a vulnerability.
As the habs retracted and locked, she touched a lit circle, and the engine came to life in blue-tinged yellow flame. The massive vehicle slowed. Ceres’s gravity pulled tighter, drawing the Ulysses down and increasing her orbital speed. Below and ahead, shining against the crystal-clear detail of the giant asteroid, the taxi lander appeared to rise up to meet them.
Cal strained against the harnesses and warmed up the motors of Ulysses’s great manipulator arm. Clicking active control over to the shoulder joint, Cal moved the arm away from the flank of the ship. It rose from its mounting point on the docking ring and its shadow crept over the two-hundred-foot-long carousel that cradled the four main fuel tanks.
Samuels burped the engine again, a short blast that brought the ship down even closer to the orbit of the taxi. Cal continued to swing the arm by the shoulder and switched control to the elbow joint, bringing the forward half of the arm down in an arc that put the grasping end within a few feet of the taxi. He clicked over to the wrist joint and canted it downwards a few degrees, rotating the oddly shaped claw around until it matched the attachment point on the stark white lander’s pressure vessel. He tabbed another illuminated square on the control, and the forearm telescoped, clicking the manipulator into place. Another swipe of a tab locked the claw-like hand closed, and he released control to Odysseus, who began to slowly draw the taxi up toward one of the docking ports. As Cal released the seat restraints, he could feel the muffled vibration and clunk of the two vehicles’ union transmitted down the long axis of the ship.
“Odysseus?”
“Yes, Commander?” the AI replied.
“Be careful of whatever programs they may have installed in the taxi.”
“Yes, sir. I will lock it off and install my own routines over theirs.”
“A wise precaution.” Zuoren nodded approvingly.
“Better safe than sorry.” Cal smiled again.
Chapter Eight
Donovan, as usual, was the last of those in charge to hear the news, and it burned her. She coasted down the curving thirty-foot long corridor to the control turret, pushing off from the floor only two or three times against the light gravity. When the door slid open, Anita El Maz greeted her wearing an embarrassingly worried expression.
“They’ve taken our taxi lander. Scott’s coming down here.”
Donovan frowned and looked over at the monitor-filled turret’s other two occupants. Laskey sat quietly, looking mildly unhappy. Bart Henry wasn’t smiling any longer, but he didn’t seem worried, either. She drew a perverse satisfaction from El Maz’s sniveling unease and knew Laskey had to be re-evaluating her contentions, but Henry’s stoicism irritated her.
“The Ulysses said so?”
“Yes,” El Maz said.
“Who is coming with him?”
“He’s coming alone,” Henry said.
Donovan looked up at the screens. “Crash the lander,” she said. “Don’t let him come down here.”
“We can’t. The lander’s not under our control. They’ve installed their own version of the AI,” Henry said.
Donovan and Laskey locked eyes for a moment before he returned his attention to Henry.
“And this doesn’t set your alarm bells ringing? They don’t trust us, and they are not going to trust us. You let any of them down here, especially him, and we’ve got more trouble than we know what to do with.”
“If only they’d just burned for a free-return around Jupiter.” El Maz moaned.
The three others looked at her for a moment and then turned away.
<
br /> “Shoot him down,” Donovan said.
Henry’s expression didn’t change; he just looked up at the telescopic view of the Ulysses, tiny and glittering in Ceres’s perpetual misty night.
Chapter Nine
Cal “stood” in the Ulysses’s docking ring. Large, round airlocks dominated the circular room; the remainder of the wall space was festooned with spacesuit lockers and cloth equipment pouches. One of the circular locks was lit red around its circumference, indicating that it would open onto the void. The other two were lit up green: One for the mission lander—a big vehicle built to carry exploratory equipment and fuel to land on the Jovian moons and return—and on the opposite side, the second green light signified the recently captured and prepped taxi lander.
The doc and Arthor floated around Cal, checking his suit, half because it was the best practice and half out of affection for their captain. Cal pulled the handle and the circular airlock door slid outwards. He smiled at Arthor and winked at the doctor to telegraph confidence he didn’t exactly feel. The bubble of his helmet dome filled with a galaxy of reflected cockpit lights as he floated into the lander’s pressure vessel and closed the hatch. Arthor pushed Ulysses’s inner hatch closed and banged on it to let Cal know it was sealed.
Cal slid in front of the taxi lander’s command screen. He pulled it out to a comfortable position and connected his ship-phone to the side where it would do comms duty. At this, Odysseus brought the interior lights to full. Indicator windows flowered across the panel announcing the readiness of the vehicle’s systems. Beyond the lander’s triple-paned viewport, Cal could see the big windows of one of the retracted habitats. Warm light poured from it, and in the clarity of the vacuum, he could see Inez waving to him. He waved back.
Wine Dark Deep: Book One Page 2