“Now, see . . . that’s where you are mistaken,” Henry said, perking up. “We think denying you your fuel changes the nature of the argument at a very basic level. Denying you your fuel draws a line.”
“It says, things are different!” Laskey blurted out.
Henry held up his hand, and Laskey sat back in his chair. “Denying Ulysses its fuel begins a conversation with an irrefutably strong statement that underlines our importance. We begin a negotiation from a stronger place.”
Henry drew his finger across the conference table, and a rectangle on its face lit up into a screen. Projected behind him, a chart of the Ulysses’s course lit up the room.
“We had hoped to keep you out of this as much as possible. We regret that there was any need for it at all, or that any increased danger is being suffered by your crew. We figured, however, that you would choose to go home.”
“With our tail between our legs.”
Donovan smiled.
“Yes. Frankly,” Henry said. “We could make a statement that the entire solar system could not ignore and no one would get hurt. Some people would have been inconvenienced, sure. Some careers impacted. Knowledge delayed. But no one would be hurt.”
“You hoped.”
“Yes. We hoped. We knew you would have enough fuel and consumables for a return trajectory so long as you hadn’t made your trans-Jupiter burn. And that burn was only to occur after refueling.”
“But you couldn’t just run, could you? You had to come here. You had to make things worse.” Helen Donovan’s expression was like sour candy.
Cal looked at her and thought of replying but turned his attention back to address the base commander. “Well, I don’t know what to say to any of you. All I am trying to do is complete my mission and bring my people home safely. I’m not here to render an opinion on your political aspirations—even though I might feel some sympathy with your point of view. But you must realize that you close minds when you put lives at risk. You look small when you try to look big. If you’re not going to give us our fuel, the Ulysses is stranded. Incapable of going anywhere else. Is that part of your plan now? Suppose you tell me how you see us, in terms of the law? Are we officially being detained? Are you making some sort of formal political announcement? I will need to make my report.”
Laskey stood. He couldn’t help himself and he started jabbing his index finger in the air toward Cal. “This isn’t a public relations game. This isn’t a contract negotiation. Some of us have lived and worked here for decades. People gave up the lives they knew back on Earth and raised families here. Died here. Many sooner than they would’ve otherwise!”
Cal’s spine stiffened and his stomach clenched. It felt like the start of a fistfight, but it was not in him to back down in such moments. “But not you. You weren’t raised here, Laskey. I read up on you, too. Immigrated to take the job ten years ago, unmarried. You’ve got very little skin in the game compared with the rest of the potential quadrillionaires around here.”
“Maybe that’s not what this is about!”
“It’s always the new converts that are the most fanatic, huh?”
“Fuck you, Earth dick.”
“Laskey!”
Donovan stood and put her hand on Laskey’s back. He calmed and sat. Donovan smiled at Cal. “Of course, there’s incredible wealth at stake, but the point is that it is our wealth. It’s ours. We earned it; our families have sacrificed for it.”
“It’s ours,” Henry said.
“There are a few companies that have put a lot of money into building this place that might disagree with you,” replied Cal.
“They made their money a long time ago.”
“You can’t do this. You can’t refuse resupply. You’re imprisoning us here. To suffocate.”
“We are not doing it. Your people are doing it. The decision makers on Earth are doing it. We think they will give in and you’ll get your fuel,” said Henry.
“And meanwhile, our window to make it to Jupiter is closing.”
“Earth knows what this is about and they let it get to this point.”
“All of Earth? All of Earth knows? I don’t. I don’t know what this is truly about, and I don’t care.” Cal looked at Donovan. “How about being the good guys? You wanted to make your point? Well, you made your point. We see the incredible things you’ve done here, and then you fuel us up and we go make scientific history. We talk about how reasonable you all were and how big a help Ceres was and the whole solar system hears about it. How about that?”
“We are not naive. We know that any story that ends with you getting your fuel would be spun as a defeat for us.” She held up her hands like she was framing a headline. “Exploration Ship Ulysses Escapes Greedy Asteroid Miners!” She dropped her hands to the table.
“It’s wrong to refuse us, and you know it. It’s unethical.”
“Unethical? What’s unethical . . . out here, so far removed from Earth’s niceties, and where space constantly reminds us how small we are? Morals are learned things but pragmatism is hardwired. What might be morally reprehensible to someone might still be an action one is capable of when circumstances warrant.”
Cal looked at Henry and Laskey. “That’s where we are?”
“That’s where we are.”
Cal took his ship-phone from his jacket pocket and placed it on the table. “I assume you’ll want this,” he said, sliding the phone over to Henry whose massive hand closed immediately over it.
Chapter Seventeen
Cal was quickly escorted back to his cell. The door locked behind him. He couldn’t tell if anyone remained outside. His guards hadn’t said a word to him, but by the same token, they had made no attempt to frisk him or otherwise invade his space. He was obviously a prisoner, but they apparently could not yet make the mental transformation to think of themselves as jailers. His cell itself was anything but. A temporary space, it had clearly been a large private bathroom until just a few days ago. He could tell by the marks in the floor that some long-standing cabinets had been removed to allow space for the single bed. They weren’t thinking of him as a proper prisoner and so they didn’t have him in a real jail cell.
He pulled the backup ship-phone from his pocket, but the reception links showed zero.
“Figures.”
He tried a text message, which failed, and an administrative ping, which also went nowhere.
Temporary jail cell or not, it was radio-shielded. Or was it? Maybe they picked the room for this reason? Maybe it was just an easily secured place where no one could make a call while taking a shit? He stared at the toilet, another thought coming to mind. He laughed. ‘Truly apropos of the situation.” He looked at the plumbing. Every other fixture and surface was plastic except for the toilet and the pipes leading to the washbasin. He remembered an anecdote about the centrifuges that he’d read somewhere. He’d even used it during a let me tell you about work conversation at a dinner party once: because of the combination of temperature extremes and the constant rotational forces, metallic pipes—printed from imported ore at incredible expense—were the only ones that wouldn’t crack. Hundreds and hundreds of feet of metal pipes bringing water to the habitats, stretching through the hub, out through a rotating radial coupling, and on to the facility where water, oxygen, and hydrogen is conjured from the asteroidal ice.
Chapter Eighteen
Three people argued, two verbally and one just with his eyes.
“Did you have to threaten him?
“Who threatened him?”
“You did, Helen. You and your professional opinion about morality and pragmatism. What was that supposed to achieve?
“What did it achieve telling him our grievances? You practically declared independence.”
Henry watched and didn’t like what he saw. They had made their plans, every contingency examined and strategies determined, but what he was seeing told him that they really were only prepared for things to go as expected. The Ulysses’s arrival,
not slinking off home, had revealed the shallowness of their preparations. He began to feel overwhelmed. Calvin Scott’s presence and performance in that conference room had rattled them, rattled him. This wasn’t supposed to happen. He shouldn’t even be here. He began to worry about what was happening, at that moment, between the other members of his cabal.
Chapter Nineteen
Cal had stripped off the outer housing of his ship-phone and pulled the coiled wire of the antennae free of the resin that held it in place. Finally revealing two terminated ends, he stripped the plugs with his teeth, squatted down, and touched the ends of the wire against the metal of the commode.
The signal links lit up. Four out of five.
Chapter Twenty
The conference room had filled up with the heads of families, attorneys, and key personnel. They quickly summarized the meeting with Cal and proceeded to argue about it at length. As usual, Bart Henry sat back and watched. Helen Donovan, in turn, watched him. From telltale movements that flashed across his normally impassive face, she surmised that he was feeling what she was feeling. It was like flying into orbit for the first time, which was accurately described as feeling like going fast over a bump in the road: your guts rise up inside you—except they don’t ever go back down. The unsettling feeling just moves in and stays. This group of conspirators, once confident in the righteousness of their cause and brave by virtue of the distance from their foes, had begun to fall apart. Henry turned her way, and their eyes locked.
As near as she could read the room, it was a mess of conversation, argument and slung recriminations. The sentiment boiled down to anger directed primarily at Ulysses and a collective horror over events not proceeding according to their unrealistic expectations. To a lesser but significant extent, Laskey and Henry bore their ire. Word must have spread of her opposition to allowing the ship’s arrival, probably from Wu and El-Maz, she figured. The general sense of frustration was bordering on childish; things never went according to plan, and anyone with any sense knew it. Why should this situation be any different? Still, she understood that the consternation of how this first critical move had played out would put more weight behind anything she now said. There was a new world on the other side of this mess. This was an opportunity to improve her standings for when the dust settled.
Henry decided that enough steam had been released and raised his bulk out of the chair, holding up his hands and pleading for attention. Their rebellion was more brittle than he had imagined. Distance was seemingly the only key to their bravery, but stubbornness combined with distance could still win them the day. He was sure they would hold together if they could discourage or deflect any further projections of Earth’s power. The Ulysses in their sky, Calvin Scott locked up in their makeshift dungeon . . . the arrival alone had done enough damage. Any more and their plans would unravel more quickly than he cared to imagine. Nothing was the way it had seemed just a few weeks ago. He was filled with unease.
“Okay, people. We understand your objections, but regardless of second guessing, we have a situation now. We have to make some very serious decisions.”
The crowd settled; every seat at the table was filled. Folding chairs were arrayed behind the table seats and occupied by heirs and attorneys. Outside, the everyday life of the mining colony continued almost as if nothing out of the ordinary was going on.
“So,” Henry said, sitting back down. “We have an Earth spaceship in orbit and its commander in our custody on the ground.”
“And whose fault is that?” ventured a voice from the folding chairs.
“We’ve been over this.”
“We haven’t gotten any answers yet!”
Henry’s hand went in the air again. “Please!” He wiped his brow. “We can only go forward here. We have a ship in orbit and its captain in our custody. They aren’t in a mood to join us, and they are demanding to be refueled. What will our response be?”
“What choice do we have?”
“We already made our choice.”
“Yes, but this is a chance to rethink!”
A hush shuffled through the room. Donovan leaned forward at the comment. This was the first tentative call to back down. If it gained steam, everything could fall apart right here. An ominous vision swamped her: the prospect of herself as a disgraced practitioner, listening to the fears of digital shut-ins day after day. She saw billions vanish from her bank account.
She stood up. “Rethink? Rethink what? Your opinions of our past and future have suddenly changed? Or are you just now realizing it might not be easy?”
Another whisper shuddered through the room, and then a tremulous voice spoke up. “We do have a choice, though. There are always choices. We can refuel them.”
“And then what?” Henry stood, seeming to lose a bit of his cool. “Do you think we can just go back to the way things were? It’s too late for all that. Once we decided not to launch those fuel tanks, we crossed the point of no return. We all decided. There’s no going back. Even if we gave this all up right now, they’d never let us. We are mutineers, and you can be damned sure they’ll understand what we’ve been up to. You think the mother companies will respect your families’ rights and holdings now? You don’t think that they have entire buildings filled with lawyers busy drafting arguments to invalidate all of that?”
The room was a quiet lake of murmurs.
“So, what do we do now?”
“We do what’s in our best interests.”
“And what is that?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing,” Henry said. “What can they do? The ship can’t go anywhere. Without the refuel, they have, at best, a week’s worth of consumable oxygen and electrical power. They will give in; we’ll send them the taxi lander and request that they evacuate to the surface where we will hold them as bargaining chips, and we seize one of the most advanced spacecrafts in the solar system for our own. All we need to do is stay calm, and this can work out even better than our original plan.”
Donovan didn’t think that Henry really believed what he said. The disposition—or disposal—of the crew would be an issue, and the consortium would not simply give up ownership of that ship. Things were infinitely worse due to Ulysses not acting as predicted, but it was a good thing for Henry to say, in the hopes of keeping their compatriots in line. She chose not to contradict him.
Chapter Twenty-One
“Ulysses. Do you read me? Come in, Ulysses.” Inez startled as Cal’s voice blasted from the speaker dollops resting in her ears.
“Cal! Ulysses here. We read you!” As if attuned to her wavelength, faces popped into view outside the door to her IT/comms compartment. They were all on edge; there had been almost no word from their commander since the landing.
“Listen, I don’t know how much time I have. They’ve got me locked up, and I think the ship is in danger as well. Dig deep, do you recall any details on the refueling launch? Status updates? Do you remember hearing news that the tankers were fueled or moved to the accelerator or anything like that? Standard update chatter?”
“I don’t know, Cal. I can go through the dispatch messages but . . .”
“That’ll take too long. Just think. Remember if you can. Ask Xu. Everyone.”
A moment passed.
“Sorry, Cal. No one really remembers anything. Not with certainty,” she said.
Cal breathed deeply. “Listen. The situation down here is bad. Don’t trust Ceres personnel. Especially if they launch the refueling tankers and you haven’t spoken with me about it.”
“Captain, what’s happening?”
“I don’t know for sure, but they’ve got big beef with Earth, and we’re caught in the middle of what might turn out to be a rebellion.”
“That’s a bad place to be.”
“That’s right. Things could really go sideways. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but these people might try to kill us.”
“Surely not!”
> “Be careful.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know, but I’m not giving up. I’m going to try and get our fuel. Without it, we’re at their mercy.”
“But I thought you said—” They were interrupted by a sudden sound from the hallway outside. Cal cut the connection and wedged his phone between the back of the toilet and the wall.
Chapter Twenty-Two
When Donovan opened the door to the cell, Cal was sitting on the toilet, pants around his ankles. With only a brief hitch in her gait, she continued into the room and sat on the unruffled bunk.
“Pretty late for a visit,” Cal said. “I figured maybe we could all sleep on it and bring some fresh eyes to the problem in the morning?”
“Your sense of humor always was an asset to you, Cal.”
“I’m all done here, so if you’ll do my modesty the favor?”
“I’m not closing my eyes in your presence, Calvin.”
“Maybe look at the ceiling? Keep an eye on me with your keen peripheral vision?”
“Ha.”
Cal simply stood up, the tails of his shirt mercifully curtained down past his thighs as he pulled up his pants. “First crisis averted. I was done,” he said, smiling.
She smiled back.
Zipping and turning to sanitize his hands, he decided to lean on whatever still existed of their personal ties and asked, “Helen . . . what the fuck?”
“What the fuck, Cal? I came here to tell you that you are in a worse situation than you know. Take it from a friend, probably the only friend you’ve got on this asteroid: rein yourself in.”
Wine Dark Deep: Book One Page 5