Wine Dark Deep: Book One

by R. Peter Keith

  “Tether system engaged,” Cal said. Three out of four was good enough to keep the lander from drifting off in reaction to his moving about and exiting.

  “Roger, taxi. Rover approaching.”

  “RCS system shutdown. De-powering fuel and oxidizer pumps.” Cal flicked off a few more illuminated squares.

  He watched the rover crawl through the perimeter of lamps. Thrusters flickered on its roof, keeping the vehicle grounded: a conspicuous use of fuel, highlighting the resource wealth of the dwarf planet. It drove up under the lander, between its tall, widely-spaced legs. Beneath the small floor window, Cal could see the roof of the rover slide by; its top hatch vanished as it mated with the lander’s bottom airlock.

  “Rover reads as docked, taxi.”

  Cal checked the seal on his helmet and glove rings and made sure they were secure. The entire point of this lander-rover system was so that astronauts could transfer in their shirtsleeves if they wanted to, but Cal didn’t feel like trusting either the systems or the people who maintained them, given the circumstances.

  The lights turned green around the rim of the floor hatch, and Cal twisted the recessed handle to raise the hatch. As he did, the rover’s ceiling hatch opened and swung downwards. He dropped through the floor and landed gently on his feet in the rover vestibule; a roughly seven by five-foot area in the center of the rover lined with airlock doors on every surface but its textured floor. The rear wall contained two smaller suit-hatches. Bulky EVA suits could be docked on the rear deck, their backpacks mating with the airlock system, opening a door for the astronaut to wriggle through and avoid bringing in outside dust. On the front wall, a large circular hatchway opened into the bubble-windowed cockpit. There was no one else inside.

  Cal swung the roof hatch closed and sealed it. The rover immediately lurched into motion. The whine of six electric motors and the crunch of the wheels on the terrain vibrated through the suspension arms and entered the interior as noise. He crouched through the forward hatch and slid into a seat suspended inside one of the rover’s bubble-eyed window blisters. The machine steered itself across the dark landscape.

  The soil sparkled; ice was everywhere and more valuable than gold. You could scoop up a bucketful of Ceres’s regolith, heat it up, and condense an amount of liquid water from it that would cost a literal fortune to lift out of Earth’s gravity well. This thought of the wealth of the planetoid only served to remind him of the real possibilities of what he might face in the attitudes of the people waiting for him.

  He pulled his ship-phone from a zippered pocket on his right thigh; the small screen lit up and informed him that there was no signal. He returned it to the pocket, thinking that the radiation shielding of the vehicle was most likely the culprit in preventing him from contacting his ship. Anxiety rose up within him again. The lights of the colony brightened the horizon and crept closer. Thoughts of failure burbled in his gut: his mission lost, his crew stranded, walking into unknown and hostile circumstances.

  The brightness of rover’s touch panels and indicators dimmed and flared as the vehicle rolled down and over the troughs and swells of the landscape. Ceres Base and the cornucopia of lights wreathing the In-Situ resource facility hove into full view over the horizon. The base structures were still miles away, but they glowed; the shrouding fog caught the lights of all of those lamps and hung a halo around the asteroid city. Automatic vehicles rumbled back and forth, headlights stabbing through the wispy air, continuing work on that near-finished farm dome and a string of smaller structures that he had not noticed during his descent. At the far end of the base, across miles of empty, cracked landscape, the resource staging and launch facility sat dark and inactive—with his refueling tankers undoubtedly languishing inside.

  Chapter Fourteen

  As the rover’s side hatch mated with Ceres Base’s boarding tunnel, Cal could see light spilling from a few windows where the tunnel met the base proper. The light flickered across the dark shapes, betraying someone or something moving around in the reception room beyond the airlock. He picked up his briefcase and exited the rover by one of its two side door hatches.

  The boarding tunnel was hardly that. Not even a quarter of the length of an airliner’s boarding ramp and, given the low gravity, Cal felt that he might be able to hop from the rover to the base in a single bound. As he stepped inside the tunnel, the locking mechanism at the far end twisted and the door itself rolled out of view. Light spilled into the tunnel, blinding him after so long in the darkened environs of the lander and rover. He kept walking. He waited for his eyes to adjust and stepped from the tunnel and into the reception vestibule.

  He was surprised by the welcoming committee waiting for him. It wasn’t a person he had seen moving around within; it was a single robot—wheeled and armless. The thing beeped at him and requested that he follow, which he did, through corridors that became progressively more sterile and clean the further they got from the airlock section. The robot led him to a doorway and asked him to step inside. Cal hadn’t seen a single soul. The room was empty; small and cell-like with a single bed, table and chair, a toilet and sink, and small video screen. He stepped into the room, and the door slid closed immediately. He heard the mechanism tumble to lock him inside.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The conference room favored by the group was located just outward from the hub of the building’s centrifuge, the next door down from the zero-G elevator. Beyond the hatch-style conference room door, Donovan sat down next to Laskey at the large white table and surveyed her compatriots: the would-be rulers of Ceres should the yoke of companies and consortiums be thrown off. This was entirely the point of everything that they had obsessed, planned, and maneuvered for over for the last few months. Or was it years? Yes, it had to be years. She sat staring at them and bristled at their stupidity. How had she ever placed her faith in these people?

  Gravatte Kravitz opened the meeting and was reporting on the burgeoning fallout over the Ulysses incident when Donovan ran out of patience.

  “Why are we talking about Earth? It’s a solar system away. Why are we not talking about the immediate consequences of our actions? The lander is on the ground, and I am hoping that you have Calvin Scott quarantined in the rover or at least confined and under guard somewhere?” She scanned faces.

  “Locked up. He hasn’t seen or talked to anyone,” Laskey said.

  “Good.”

  Commander Henry sighed and looked at her as if she were the fool. He picked up his phone and flicked through what she supposed were notes for the meeting as Sylvia Wu shifted uncomfortably in her seat. By refusing the Ulysses their fuel they had lit a bomb’s fuse and yet now acted as if the arrival of the ship in orbit and Calvin Scott’s presence at Ceres Base were some unexpected and unrelated intrusion.

  “Why do you hate this man so?” Henry finally asked.

  “I don’t.” Everyone looked at her as if she were lying. “Seriously. I don’t.”

  Henry lowered his gaze and put his phone onto the table. “You’ve recommended that we kill him more than once already. Clearly, you hate the man.”

  “I’m disappointed that you don’t understand where I am coming from. It’s not hate. I’m not a skittish creature, but I’m afraid of him, given our situation.”

  Wu said something to Anschloss under her breath. Henry smiled. The combined effect of this incensed her, compelling her to continue. “You don’t know him. I have known him for decades, and I’ve seen how he operates in good times and bad. He is a very capable man. If he were sitting here with us, with the same aims as us, I’d want his counsel on every issue. But he isn’t one of us. He isn’t on our side, and because of that, he is dangerous.”

  No one responded, choosing instead to look over at the base commander. They were all on board for rebellion and the wealth it promised, but none were up for even the punishment and verbal jousting that defending their opinions would require. As a psychologist, she was unsurprised. As a conspirator, she was cr
ushed by the lack of fight in most of her compatriots.

  “What do you expect to say to him? What are you going to let him see—and what is he going to end up seeing whether you want him to or not?” she asked.

  The atmosphere in the room seemed to cloud up; miniature arguments blossomed.

  “Why does he have to be allowed to see anything?”

  “What are we going to do? Keep him locked up?”

  “We can’t do that. Can we?”

  “I’m not sure about this. This seems wrong.”

  Corbin El-Maz, patriarch of one of the “great” families, interrupted. “The point was to force the ship to abandon its mission and return to Earth. To create months of publicity with us looking strong—but now that ship is here, where does that leave us? We shouldn’t have let them come here.”

  “What could we do to stop them,” Anschloss asked rhetorically.

  “Nothing,” Kravitz said, answering anyway.

  “Nothing except ask them not to, which we did. Strenuously,” said Laskey.

  “And they didn’t listen. Expect more of that if we are going to bring Calvin Scott into this room,” Donovan said, taking some small comfort in El-Maz’s brief show of backbone.

  Henry shifted his massive bulk and looked around before speaking. “Well . . . He is here. We all agreed that the Ulysses would choose to go for a free-return trajectory around Jupiter and we would have our statement made for us but, somehow . . .”

  “I didn’t agree,” Donovan said.

  Henry glared at her and continued. “Somehow that’s not what happened. Instead, the Ulysses is in orbit. They’re here. He’s here. We’re either going to speak with him or we are not. I say we talk.”

  “About what?” Donovan asked.

  “Yes, about what? What are we going to say to him?” El-Maz turned to Henry. “He’s going to want an explanation. He’s going to want his fuel. Are we going to give it to him?”

  The room suddenly filled with voices.

  “We’re not going to give it to him.”

  “With what excuse are we going to justify that?”

  “And what are we going to do with him, with them?”

  “What can we do with them?”

  “I thought we were going to grab the ship?”

  Henry nodded and tried to steer the room towards the fact that there were only three Eureka-class interplanetary ships yet in existence and Ceres taking hold of one would be a real coup, but Corbin El-Maz interrupted again and derailed his attempt.

  “This has gone wrong, we’re not ready. What are we going to say to Earth?”

  “Stop thinking about Earth, that’s half the point. Earth is way out there and we are here.”

  “We are still going to have to explain ourselves sooner now than before, with us stranding a ship in our sky. They’ll call them hostages.”

  “No, they won’t.”

  “They will!”

  “Who is they? Some people won’t, some will. We shouldn’t be concerned with the public opinion of the people we want to break away from.”

  “The point is that now we have an acute crisis instead of an extended one. We need to have answers ready.”

  “We have answers, we just aren’t ready to give them.”

  “Are we announcing? Is that what this means?”

  “It’s premature.”

  “We’ve always known we’d have to announce our intentions sooner or later, but this incident doesn’t have to force our hand. The discussion is still about the fuel tankers and the reasons we have already stated as to why we decided not to send them. Let’s just keep to plan. They can worry about a ship stranded in orbit just as well as one toughing it out to limp home.”

  “Yes, but toughing it out to limp home was a great story. A perfect story: astronauts versus nature. The media’d blame the greedy mother companies for their shady business practices and the consortium for sending people on such a dangerous mission in the first place before they’d ever have blamed us. But not now. Now it’s us being greedy. You watch. Now the story will be astronauts versus us.”

  “We’re the bad guys. The media will say we’re holding them hostage, like I said.”

  “This wasn’t supposed to happen.”

  Henry moved to stand up and dissolve the session, but his eyes caught on Donovan’s and she wouldn’t let go. “I told you,” she said. “He’s only just landed, and look at us.”

  Commander Henry nodded. “Let’s talk with him,” he said softly. “But not in front of the whole group.” He slid his phone into his pocket and pushed his chair in against the table. “Smile, Helen. It’s entirely possible we’ll have to kill him later.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The two jumpsuited men that had escorted Cal from his very private room slouched in the hallway outside of the conference room.

  “We wait here,” one of them said. “They’ll come get you.” This was more conversation than Cal had been able to elicit since they had appeared and unlocked his door.

  Cal folded his arms and rocked on his heels, noting the way the walls curved to meet the floors. His slouching guards displayed no hint of military discipline and didn’t seem to be particularly concerned about their charge. He studied the hallway, wandering off a few steps to peer down an intersecting corridor, trying to match the interior of the base with maps he had seen. The taller of the guards straightened up and coughed, staring at him. Cal returned to stand directly outside the conference room door.

  Less than a minute later, the door opened and he could see the dark bulk of Bart Henry crowd the opening. He grinned widely. “Welcome to Ceres, Captain Scott.” He waved him in, offering him a seat at a table that could seat at least twenty, but the only other people in the room were Helen Donovan and Arno Laskey.

  “Sit down, Captain. There are a lot of people here anxious to talk to you, but we felt it best to keep our first meeting small.”

  “Nice to meet you, Commander, Administrator Laskey. Helen, good to see you again.” Cal sat.

  “Nice to meet you, Captain. I’m just sorry it’s under such circumstances.”

  “Me as well, Commander. Call me Cal. I’m hoping that we can find a way around this problem and move forward.” He smiled at the people in room.

  “You surprised us, Cal, by taking our lander. We had expected to receive yours. I apologize for the lack of a warm welcome.”

  “Well, I figured that’s what taxi landers are for. I was anxious to settle what I am assuming is a misunderstanding, and our lander is heavy with exploration gear.”

  “I see.”

  “And we’re a little low on fuel.”

  “Yes . . . Well, we would still have appreciated if you had consulted us on the use of our equipment,” Laskey said. “For all of our sakes. It’s a safety issue.”

  “On behalf of my crew and myself, I apologize.”

  “As if you didn’t know what you were doing. As if you didn’t know you’re supposed to file a flight plan,” Donovan said.

  Cal looked at her. “I can see something is bothering you, Helen. And it is nice to see you again, but really, I should be the angry one.” He leaned forward in his seat, adopting an aggressive posture for the first time since entering the conference room. “Because I have a crew and a mission that are my top priority, and I know they’re not yours. I can see that we have somehow ended up tangled in larger circumstances here. But we don’t have to be. The Ulysses’s mission stands outside of business and politics.”

  “The Ulysses is built and owned by the mother companies and leased to the consortium,” Bart Henry said.

  “Yes, a decade for a single Nine Nations dollar. I know you have grievances with the mother companies, I’ve read all about it, but we are not the mother companies. We got them to give us one of their most advanced interplanetary spaceships for strictly exploratory purposes—an incredible opportunity—and we’re making the most of it. And the consortium freely releases all of its scientific findings. You know
that. Whatever your problem with the MC, we have nothing to do with it.” Cal looked at the three faces in front of him. Almost as a plea, or a crack in his confidence, he added, “Voyages of exploration like this come along only once in a great many lifetimes. We need our fuel. I’m asking you to honor the deal you made.”

  “The deal we made?” Laskey asked.

  Bart Henry clasped his fingers together and placed his balled fists onto the table in front of him. “The mother companies, the consortium, they broke other deals. Older deals.”

  Cal sat for a second, quieted. Where was this going? he thought. Certainly not where or how he had expected. He’d expected more pleasantries; the veneer of civility was so thin that it was already cracking. These three people were under more pressure than he had realized. Trying to slide through this situation with the grease of neutrality wasn’t going to cut it. As he feared, the Ulysses had become an important part of whatever plans they were enacting, even if it was only in the form of a catalyst, leverage, or the match in the tinder box. Still, he decided to make one more stab from this angle, if only to give him some additional time to think. “The Ulysses is on the scientific mission of the century. We both know that we have a limited time before we lose our launch window and the mission is a failure. Do you really want to be seen by the world as having stood in the way?”

  “Seen . . . by the world? How Earth-centric, your thinking. This is part of the problem. Ceres is nearly self-sufficient. And without the value and accessibility of our resources, the quadrillions of dollars invested into the industrialization and colonization of the solar system is worthless . . . and yet we are treated like employees—or worse. We’re not employees. We’re owners!”

  “I’m not here to acknowledge or deny any ownership claims. I’m certain there are those on the opposite side of the solar system with claims of their own. I don’t know who is right or who is wrong, but I do know that denying me my fuel is not going to change the nature of the argument.”