“Internal systems to ready,” he said into his mic.
“Roger that, Cal,” said the pilot’s voice through the speaker in his helmet’s neck ring.
“Environmental and computer to full power, transferring alignment and positional data,” Cal said as they ran down the standard flight checklist.
“Roger,” came Samuels’s practiced response. “Cabin leak check?”
“Cabin leak check cleared.”
“Roger that.”
“Ready to cast off.”
“Clear to detach, Cal.”
He reached above his head and twisted the handle that freed the lander from the docking airlock. A short burst of compressed gas from its thrusters pushed the vehicle away from the ship. He was free to navigate, floating in a dizzying depth of blackness. The interior lights dimmed, controls and displays becoming brighter as the habitat drifted lazily to the left of his viewport.
“Align IMU to confirm position.”
Cal placed his hand on his screen and centered a wavering circle in the center of a blinking target. “Check.”
“Activate fuel and oxidizer pumps.”
A set of red circles within circles appeared on the control screen. He touched them with his fingers and rotated them until they turned green.
“Power to pumps, check.”
“Open fuel valves.”
“Fuel valves open,” he said, fingers stabbing at a cluster of flashing squares.
“Activate RCS.”
More squares blossomed open and vanished at his touch.
“RCS systems activated,” he said.
The comm system beeped as Inez cut in. “Cal, I had Paul put an extra ship-phone in the pilot’s storage bin.”
“Is that right?”
“Xu’s idea. If things go bad and they take yours maybe they won’t think to look for another. “
Cal smiled. “Well, it’s a waste of mass if I don’t make use of it. Tell him I said good thinking.” He slid the plastic slab from the storage pocket and slipped it into his jacket.
“Go for ullage burn,” said Samuels, getting back to business.
Cal touched his hand to a vertical stripe of color on the side of his control screen. A horizontal bar lit up under his finger, and he slid it upwards. The engines of the lander responded by throttling up, vibrating the tiny craft. Just as quickly, he slid the tab back to zero, and the engines went quiet.
“Ullage burn complete,” Cal said into his mic. The momentum of this quick burn would settle the fuel in the taxi’s tanks, allowing for a smooth and uninterrupted feed of liquid hydrogen into the engine during the flight and ensuring that the fuel level readings were correct.
“You’re clear of the ship and Go to orient for transfer burn, Cal.”
“Are you sure you don’t want me to do this?” the version of Odysseus recently installed into the taxi asked. The AI was easily capable of flying the lander on a pre-set course to the base.
“No, I like to fly,” Cal replied. And he needed to occupy his mind during the forty-five-minute flight. “You do your job, and I’ll do mine.”
The AI automated so many tasks, from monitoring and regulating tank pressures to the firing of RCS thrusters to cease motion after a pitch, roll, or yaw, that an actual co-pilot was unnecessary. Cal would be able to concentrate on flying. Which was a good thing since he didn’t plan on following anything like the standard low-gravity landing flight plan.
He was still, essentially, in the same two hundred and fifty-mile-high, perfectly circular orbit the Ulysses had occupied since grabbing the taxi. He slid his fingers over a disc-shaped control on his touchscreen; it spun like a platter. RCS thrusters outside the craft pitched the vehicle so that the taxi’s back faced down toward the asteroid and its engines aimed at its direction of travel. His fingers moved to a second disc and twirled it; then, horizontally placed thrusters flared to roll him over so that the planetoid below appeared in his viewport. Opposing thrusters belched quickly to stop the roll at the right moment.
“Go for transfer burn, Cal.”
Cal touched the thrust tab and slid it all the way forward. Bright blue-yellow cones of flame burst from the twin engines, slowing the ship. Cal held the slider in position as the mission timer clicked away.
The slowing taxi was, second by second, falling deeper into Ceres’s gravity, dropping and gathering speed. Its orbit had gone from perfectly circular to an exaggerated ellipse that would bring it down to just fifty thousand feet above the ground on exactly the opposite side of the planetoid from where Cal had begun the burn. If he did nothing, the little taxi would loop back up around Ceres, returning to its apogee two hundred and fifty miles above.
Cal had half an orbit to think. He didn’t relish the time, but the lander’s descent path would give him a better look at the icy, dusty, treasure house of an asteroid. Ceres was the largest object in an asteroid belt made up of millions of objects. So large that it made up over a third of the entire belt’s mass. A good amount of that mass was in the form of water ice, and every now and then, due to an odd combination of forces, a geyser of sublimated water vapor would spew out of the little world. Ice volcanoes. As such, Ceres had its own faint atmosphere, and it lent it an air of mystery: a tenuously shrouded and misty sphere against a backdrop of endless clarity.
Dropping down below one hundred miles, he could see a shattered area that appeared to be made up of great crusts of ice and clay heaving over one another. Another quarter way around the small globe and he would reach the low point in the transfer orbit. That would be the time to initiate descent. He looked over the taxi’s systems, and as he did, a sparkling reflection from his viewport caught his attention: an object rising from the surface? He looked again but could see nothing. Paranoia?
The taxi lander swept down, approaching the low point—the nadir—of its orbit. Cal’s fingers hovered over the control screen. There would be a nearly endless number of repeat tries if he missed. The lander would stay in its transfer orbit, shifting between the high point of the parking orbit and the fifty thousand foot low point, but Cal wasn’t about to miss the moment, and he had a sneaking suspicion that Odysseus would fire the engines if he failed to act, even though he had asked it not to.
Right at fifty thousand feet, he slid the thrust to full, and the lander shed enough of its remaining momentum that Ceres’s gravity had it. There was nothing that was going to keep it from falling to the planetoid. There just wasn’t enough fuel remaining in its tanks to put the taxi back into orbit. Technically, all paths in space were orbits, this new one the taxi was falling along just happened to intersect with the ground.
Now, Cal thought, it was all about mitigating the fall.
Chapter Ten
Donovan walked along the curving corridor floor of the full-G habitat named Wallflower. That the corridor curved not to the left or right but rather up and down had long ago ceased to bother her. She walked, rather than floated, because she was inside a spinning multi-story centrifuge ring mounted horizontally inside its own building. Because of this, she was actually walking at a right angle to the planetoid’s landscape. The artificial gravity created by the centrifuge produced a near earth-normal field. The only telltale signs of the odd orientation of her home was that dust seemed to collect on the surface-side of rooms and corridors, and that if you dropped something, seven times out of ten, it would skitter to that particular side. The only time that she had ever noticed that her surroundings were rapidly spinning was when she had opened the shades of one of those rare real windows in the centrifuge’s walls and saw Wallflower’s inner skin flash by. Never again.
There was a discernible buzz in the hallways and common rooms that whispered away as she approached and burbled back to life as she passed. She didn’t need to guess what the buzz was about. It had exploded just after internet access had been cut off following the decision to deny the refueling. The colony leadership had cut it off, at her recommendation, in an effort to try and manage the
tensions she knew were about to rise. It was not that the colony population had no appetite for conflict with the mother companies, but rather that bits and pieces of knowledge about what the leadership had planned, and information on how far they would go, was dispersed among the population of the base. The more information that passed between Ceres and the rest of the solar system, the greater the chance those bits and pieces might be puzzled together and the extent of their plans surmised.
Two young men appeared at the far end of the curving hallway, revealed inch by inch beneath the corridor ceiling as it curved upwards and away in the distance. As she drew closer, feet were revealed first, then legs, then crotch and torso and so on; revealed as if a curtain was being raised, due to the circular geometry of the living space. She saw their faces as they saw hers. Smiles vanished. They recognized her for who she was. She had lived and held a prominent position in this small, close-knit society at the furthest edge of human space for four years now, and she had not for one moment felt that life here was anything other than the job. She was prepared to cast her lot in with these few people for life, and yet she didn’t really like any of them. Her eyes glazed over icily and her lips cracked into a smile as she thought about how quickly their smiles had faded. No one wanted the Psych Chief to be reminded of their existence.
She stepped out of an elevator and walked halfway down the corridor to the right and passed through doors that opened automatically to her presence and no one else’s. Her quarters were a flight up, residing at a slightly lower level of gravitation. They were amply if eclectically appointed. A nineteenth century grandfather clock, printed just last year from a high-res scan made in a New Canaan, Connecticut shop, was positioned at an angle in a corner of the main room. Next to the clock, a low-slung and minimalist prev-century modern couch spanned the space between the room’s two reality-rated video windows. She spent a moment on the stark view of the icy world being shown by the faux windows; it was a live feed from a camera mounted on the building’s exterior. She scanned the skies but nowhere could she see a sign of the intruders, even though she knew there were two unwelcome moving objects in her sky.
She called an entoptic screen into existence in the air before her. It lit up and became nearly opaque.
“Main Base telescope feed,” she said.
The screen flashed to darkness.
“Track taxi lander.”
The darkness scrolled and focused on a glittering pinprick, and then zoomed. In the clarity of the thin atmosphere she could see the lander in breathtaking detail, even at this distance; she could see the web-work of golden spars and struts that made up the landing carriage and the gem-shaped pressure vessel flanked by bell-shaped engines spewing blue-yellow flame. She dimmed the lights and watched, praying that someone on this godforsaken asteroid would come to their senses and fling a rock, a chunk of ice, or even a completed fuel tanker at the thing—and wipe Calvin Scott from existence.
Chapter Eleven
The taxi lander dove through the faint mists and gases that substituted for an atmosphere. Twin pillars of fire lanced from its engines as it shot over the gray-white globe. At just over twenty thousand feet in altitude and dropping, the lander was deep in the middle of its braking burn. In order to speed the descent, Cal had the ship under sixty percent thrust, engines still blasting almost exclusively against the direction of travel, bleeding off horizontal velocity. In Ceres’s weak gravity, he could come down fast and use the majority of fuel in the final stages of landing to eat up his remaining velocity. The gravitational force was weak, but it was clearly present, and it did command attention.
At this altitude and dropping gently against the gravity, he was still more than four hundred horizontal miles away from his landing target, some ten miles to the west of the base and main mining facility. For safety’s sake, landing sites were always positioned well away from any installations. One thing you didn’t want was a crippled lander on a ballistic course plowing into your surface assets.
A Quindar tone issued from the comms speakers. “Taxi lander, we do not have you on the standard landing path. Advise?”
“No issue, Ceres Control.” He snapped off the connection.
Despite a gentle descent, he was lower at this point than anyone on the ground would expect. When landing at an established base in such a weak gravity field, the standard procedure was to zero out horizontal velocity and make a near vertical descent. Given the current situation, he was bringing the lander down like an exploration vehicle: a long arc with an extended approach phase that would allow him to scout out the landing site for any . . . irregularities.
At just below ten thousand feet, with more fuel in his tanks than expected, he had shed almost five thousand feet per second from his horizontal velocity. He pitched the vehicle into a better position to view the terrain ahead. At the same time, he angled the twin engines downward to start canceling out more of his sink rate—while continuing to eat up the remaining horizontal six hundred feet per second.
Through the viewport, Cal could see an eerily lit complex sprawled in the dark distance, drawing closer. This was the colony, a spattering of umbilically-joined habitat buildings nestled in the arms of a cove of mountainous regolith-capped ice. A crazed array of lamps of all sizes illuminated a maze of skyscraper-scale pipes, spheres, and drums, half-buried in the soil to shield against radiation. The light draped the frozen landscape in long, stark shadows broken only by stretches of soil luminous with reflective ice and minerals
When he descended below eighty-five hundred feet, Cal flipped on the LiDAR for a moment—and yawed the lander to sweep the colony structures with laser light. This would give him his own map of what had been built on Ceres to compare with the published data. In terms of flight etiquette, blasting a mapping laser at an established and inhabited base was known as a dick move. There would be no hazards in the landing zone that base personnel would not sweep clear and so no need for such exposure. Normally.
In the middle distance, two glass-roofed domes peeked out from shrouds of hard-packed regolith. They leaked green-tinged light and rippled with leafy shadows. Another dome lay incomplete, naked of dirt, and dark but surrounded by all sorts of temporary illumination rigs, its perimeter crowded with construction equipment. Nearly identical to the finished domes, Cal assumed it would become another farm. Another farm that would make Ceres all the more self-sufficient.
Chapter Twelve
Donovan watched the taxi lander descend expertly to the pad on both the entoptic screen that seemed to float to her right and on the screen that pretended to be a grand window spanning the wall of her apartment. Despite her warnings, he was here, and she would eventually come face to face with him again. She was certain it would eventually fall upon her to deal with him. She swatted angrily at where the entoptic screen appeared to be and it vanished. His presence on Ceres filled her with dread. She was out-and-out afraid of Calvin Scott.
She had met him in her early twenties while they were in college, and their paths had crossed multiple times over the years. At one point, and for a considerable time, she had been delighted by him. Even now, she felt no real malice toward the man—she just feared him for the wildcard he was. If he would consent to be part of their little cabal, she would be pleased, but she knew him well enough to know that was impossible. And because it was impossible, he was dangerous. Dangerous by virtue of his position, his wit, and his aggravating tendency to be at the right, or wrong, place at the right time. He had risen this far by virtue of his aptitude for making optimal decisions in crucial moments. She did not hate him, but that didn’t mean she didn’t wish him dead.
Cal Scott lived to upset the applecart, and now it was her applecart.
She stood, kicked at her coffee table, and headed out the door to the curving hallways that would bring her to the control turret.
Chapter Thirteen
When the taxi had entered the previously planned approach phase and fallen below an altitude of eight thous
and feet, it was about four and a half miles from the landing site, barreling along at six hundred feet per second but slowing. Its fuel tanks were nearly drained, but it would be only two or three more minutes until touchdown. Cal constantly shifted the pitch angle of the articulated engines between seventy-three and seventy-five degrees, thrusting to balance the lander against gravity as the last of its horizontal velocity was killed off.
The landing site was clear as a bell, ringed in shining white and lit by a red cross of marker lamps. He could see a twelve-wheeled electric rover trundling toward the site, looking like a wingless wasp with its sharp-nosed bubble-windowed cockpit, broad suspension armatures, and yellow and black roll bars enclosing the open rear deck.
At five hundred feet above the surface, Cal was directly over the landing site, engines angled straight down, drawing the thrust slider slowly toward zero. Despite the unexpected amount of dust kicking up from the paved landing pad, the high-mounted twin engines allowed him to keep thrusting right down to the ground while maintaining excellent visibility. The four footpads kissed the ground at almost the exact same moment, a blast of thrust downward from the RCS system negated the tendency for the lander to bounce back off the planetoid. Cal reached out to begin knocking away colored blocks of light that appeared on the control screen.
“Engine shut down,” Cal spoke calmly into his helmet mic. “Fuel valve cutoff engaged.”
“Good news, Cal.” Samuels faraway voice crackled over his radio and was cut off by a burst of static.
“Roger that, taxi,” said a voice from Ceres control, about ten miles over a series of hilly rises to the west.
Cal twisted a projected dial and a vibration crackled through the lander’s frame. From four points around the landing carriage, pressurized canisters released spike-like pitons that flew out toward the ground, towing nylon straps. Three of the four pitons dug in and gripped, and small electric motors tensioned the straps. The fourth pulled free and clanged against a landing leg.
Wine Dark Deep: Book One Page 3