Wine Dark Deep: Book One

by R. Peter Keith

  Something about the way she said it bothered him. There was more grit in her than in the Helen he remembered.

  “Back in the meeting you said something about seeing things our way.”

  “I did.”

  “Can we talk about that?” She patted the tight bedclothes of the bunk.

  “I have my problems with the mother companies. You know I have. And Earth is a mess. It’s the same absurd mess it’s always been. But on the balance, the world continues to advance. I’m for that.”

  “And we’re not part of your world? Look what we’re doing out here. We are the ones ensuring humanity’s future as a multi-planet species and you know it. But we are doing it by devoting our lives to it. You know that, too: once you come out here it’s not so easy to go back. Physically or mentally.”

  “Yes. Like I said, I might be sympathetic but—”

  She cut him off. “But you’re on a scientific mission and science should be above politics. I know, I know. You’re going to have to face facts, Cal. It’s time to make the best of a bad situation. And it can be made very good. I know you’re not naive, I know you comprehend the wealth and power that will come with being humankind’s key to the solar system. And maybe one day, beyond.”

  “Helen.”

  “You can complete your mission. We can figure it out. Or another mission. And you can leave and return a rich man. All of your people. Heroes and rich.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “I am,” she said.

  “And Bart Henry has agreed to this? Laskey? The others that I presume must exist?”

  “Come, sit.” She patted the bunk next to her.

  Would that be smart, he wondered? Could he read her better up close? Would she see into him more easily? He moved closer, leaning against the wall, but did not sit. He knew she would be analyzing every move, every expression. “Helen, I want to complete my mission. That’s all. I don’t need to be a part of this. The Ulysses doesn’t need to be a part of this.”

  “What if you announced your solidarity with us? Joined us? You could complete your mission and return home—to Ceres.”

  “Helen.”

  “Think about it. Here is a way out that solves both of our problems.”

  “Helen, you know we can’t. Beyond a question of allegiances, my people have lives. Families.”

  “They can emigrate, Cal.”

  “No, Helen. I don’t care how far we are from home. I said I would complete this mission, and that is what I am going to do. The situation on Earth may be imperfect—but neither is it a tyranny to be escaped yet either. And whatever the terms, the Ulysses is the consortium’s ship, and the consortium is an organization that largely has its heart in the right place. I have no right to hand her over to you no matter what you might promise me.”

  At that, Helen stood, her face a grim mask. “I didn’t think I would be able to reach you, Calvin. But I thought I would try.” She straightened her jacket. “Not for old time’s sake or anything like that,” she said. “But just because it would be easier.”

  “What’s next, Helen?”

  “What’s next? I don’t think there is a next for you, Cal.” She crossed to the door, pressing the tab on the wall next to it. It slid open for her. “Don’t you realize that we can never let you leave here?”

  Cal took a deep breath, weighed his options, stepped forward, and punched her right in the face.

  She fell like a sack of bricks, preventing the door from sliding closed. Cal hopped back, fists clenched and ready. He hadn’t thought anything through. He certainly hadn’t planned to punch anyone in the face. Let alone Helen. Although if it had to be someone, she was as good a person as any in his book. He tensed, waiting for the two men on guard to rush into the room. Truth be told, he’d been in fights before, but he wasn’t a born fighter.

  No one rushed into the room.

  He cautiously inched forward, glancing down at Helen’s crumpled form. She was motionless but breathing as if fast asleep.

  He peered outside, fully expecting a boot or fist to the head. There was no one. Incredibly, the guards were gone.

  Unless it wasn’t so incredible. Maybe Helen’s visit was unauthorized? Maybe the guards had been purposefully called off? Maybe that was the only way she had been able to get in to talk to him alone? It had to be something like that; what else could it be? He tried to remember his first walk through the building. Inward to the hub, out of the centrifuge, and down to the Ceres-G first floor. He dashed down a corridor that he hoped was the correct one.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Bart Henry stared across his small, extruded office desk at Donovan and her blossoming eye and swollen cheek.

  “You should have waited. What were you thinking? A few more hours and Laskey says his people would have had those bugs ready. We could have let him talk to his ship and heard every word of it. Now . . .” He drew his stylus across the screen that unrolled onto his desktop, his frustration evident as he crossed lines off of handwritten notes.

  “It doesn’t matter. We should have been ready for this and we weren’t. I offered him a haven here. Citizenship. A piece. I said we’d let him finish his mission if he did it under our flag.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “I did.”

  “What did he say?”

  She glowered at him.

  “Of course. Well . . . you know what? That was a smart tack to take, but it was stupid to try it on your own. You’re lucky Calvin Scott is a better friend to you than you are to him. Otherwise he’d have broken your neck.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Well, there’s no way we can let him go back now.”

  “I know,” Donovan said.

  “Which was what you wanted.”

  “I was worried that we would all fall apart. That no one would make the decision before it was too late.”

  Henry grimaced.

  “Can you track him?”

  “Well, Helen. I’ve got Wu working on that. She says we can track base personnel by their equipment, but Cal isn’t carrying base equipment.”

  “What about his ship-phone?”

  “We took it.”

  “He’ll have another.”

  “We searched him.”

  “Not well enough.”

  Henry nodded his great, dark dome. “Wu said she can’t easily differentiate between base-phones and a ship-phone.”

  “They must transmit on a different frequency or something?”

  “That’s what I thought, but that’s not the way it works. It’s packets of data, not different frequencies.”

  “Then differentiate him by the packets.”

  “That’s what I said. Wu says it’s easier said than done. Her team is researching. Meanwhile, I’ve got security on alert all throughout the base, but as you’ve said, we weren’t prepared for a prisoner, much less an escape. This is now officially your fuckup.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Cal ducked through a doorway, put his hands on his knees, and caught his breath. He slid the door closed. He was in a small antechamber. There were a few slots in the walls and a receptacle that held trays like those used in a cafeteria. He peeked through the slots to see the stainless steel sheen of a darkened kitchen beyond. He hadn’t seen anyone during his minutes of flight, but his heart had pounded harder at each successive corner and corridor, and he couldn’t take any more. He needed to stop and rest. He slid the backup phone from his pocket, the antennae wire spooled around its top.

  He spoke to the copy of his ship’s AI installed on his phone. “Odysseus . . . is there a way you can show me the location of base personnel?”

  The phone lit up with Odysseus’s icon—a Greek trireme with a lowercase c superimposed over it, denoting a copy. This was Odysseus—but not the same Odysseus as was currently operating the Ulysses. “The base’s systems are locked, but they did not remember to exclude baseline features. I can access the underlying emergency systems.” The scre
en blanked, and a schematic that looked like a wagon wheel appeared. Glowing blue circles hovered and drifted across the spokes and interstitial areas, indicating the location of every operating phone in the facility. The wheel represented the centrifuge. There were eight radial spokes striking out from the hub with multiple circular corridors arrayed in concentric rings. The hub contained the low-G main staircase and elevators. The outer rim made up the outermost living and office areas, closest to the inner skin of the building that enclosed the centrifuge.

  Cal smiled broadly and bled off stress with a long wheezing breath. “Outstanding.” He traced the route that he thought he remembered, which led to the airlock where his rover docked. Multiple blue circles loitered in the area. The rover was probably guarded. He had figured as much, but he had hoped he might catch another break. Two blue circles appeared toward the end of the corridor off which he was currently hiding. He held his breath as they bobbled past his spot and continued down the spoke toward the rim of the wheel. When they had rounded a corner, he slid out of the tray return room and headed in the opposite direction, down one of the eight main radial spokes, toward the hub and the main entrance. Halfway down the corridor, blue circles appeared in the hub, indicating people riding up the elevator or mounting the stairs. He froze and backed up, retracing his steps. There were equidistant doors along the corridor, but none opened at his approach or his touch. He retreated quickly to the tray room and watched the blue circles exit the hub. If he had been on one of the circular ring corridors, the curvature would have hidden him, but on the straight-line spokes, he would be spotted immediately. One blue circle struck out along a different radial spoke, but the other proceeded alone, down the spoke that led straight toward him.

  He slid back up against the wall next to the door and watched the blue circle approach. It wavered, as if the system couldn’t get an exact location on the phone the person was carrying, and stopped in front of the door to the tray room. The door slid open and a slight man carrying a tray of half-eaten food entered the room. Immediately, Cal could see that this person wasn’t searching for him. He entered the room absentmindedly, crossed the space and slid his tray into one of the slots in the wall and hesitated. Still facing the slots, his back to Cal, he reached into his pocket and withdrew his phone. It lit up with the image of a nude woman. The man stopped and made a grunting sound. He turned, still staring at the phone and walked out the door as if Cal hadn’t been there at all. The door slid closed, and Cal stood there dumbfounded, fists clenched. He smiled involuntarily.

  Once the clueless admirer of the female form had moved a sufficient distance down the spoke, Cal exited the tray room and headed back to the hub—only to scurry away again at the appearance of additional blue circles. It was just too busy, too much of a thoroughfare. He retreated, past the door for the tray room and headed for the outermost rim, gravity subtly increasing as he went.

  Blue circles inside the rooms bracketing the corridor shifted position, but none moved to enter the hallway as he swept down its length. At the end of the long spoke-corridor, a hallway curved away to the right and left of him. This was the outermost ring. The rim. Directly in front of him was a doorway more robust than those that lined the corridors and halls. This was an exit. A portal to leave the centrifuge and enter the space between the spinning habitat and its enclosing structure. Large red graphic arrows were applied to the wall indicating the change in the direction of gravity that would occur if one chose to pass through. He dashed a look to the curving corridor to the right and left of him and grasped the hatch handle, pushed down, and pulled. The door slid into the corridor, and beyond the opening, the inner skin of the containment structure was revealed, rushing past at hundreds of miles per hour—or so it seemed. He knew that the blurred inner building structure he was staring at was, in reality, sitting still. The corridor he was in was spinning, but just from his vantage point it didn’t look that way. He gulped, holding onto the outer door handle, and leapt, swinging out and swinging the door shut in the same moment. Instantaneously, he was like a tiny bug clinging to the surface of a vast whirling top, huddled within the box of the casement building. Spinning round and round at speeds necessary to simulate a sufficient gravitational field.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “Where is he? Where’s he going?” Bart Henry’s aggravation echoed through the Ops Blister.

  Donovan held an ice pack to the side of her face. Laskey stood behind Sylvia Wu’s chair and stared at the cluster of screens in front of her. Multiple wagon wheel floor plans lit each screen.

  “I still can’t trace anyone but our own people—but I think I can detect when doors open. A door that opens without one of the dots representing our people in front of it should show us where he is,” Wu said.

  “So? Anything?” Henry asked.

  “Not so far. Not that I’ve seen anyway.”

  “Have you been watching?”

  “I have but there are a lot of doors and a lot of floors in the habitat.”

  “Is there a record of what doors have opened and when?”

  “Not interior doors. Only airlocks and none of those have opened at all.”

  Henry’s eyes narrowed. “He’s not looking to escape. Not yet. Where would he go?”

  “He’s going to try and contact his ship,” Donovan said.

  Henry batted at a tab on his base-phone and held it up to his mouth. “This is Base Commander Henry. I want guards placed around every transmitter in this base. Doubly so at the emergency transmitter room.” He paused, then added, “And station guards at the airlocks. On the double. Henry out.” He placed his phone on the table in front of him and stared at Donovan. “Just in case.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Cal opened his eyes, but the situation hadn’t changed. He was still clinging to the whirling stories-tall habitat centrifuge, grasping tightly to the outer handle of the access door, boots braced against its generous frame. The walls of the casement building were still a spinning vertiginous blur just feet from his face.

  He forced his view from the streaking walls and back to the comforting illusion of the stillness of the centrifuge. Just beyond the door, just over the outermost curve of the centrifuge, were the rungs of an access ladder. He reached out for it and wrapped his fingers around the first rung, his wedding band clanging as he closed his grip around it and swung from the doorframe to the ladder. He looked down; the habitat was four stories tall—but the orientation had changed. He was now basically hanging from the underside of the lowest floor. He had to keep a tight grip as he descended, otherwise the spinning of the centrifuge would throw him off, slamming him with deadly force against the outer casement wall.

  The centrifuge’s exterior was a myriad of pipes and conduits interrupted every so often by an actual window—every single one of which was closed tightly and covered with a layer of dust that somehow clung despite the centrifuge’s rapid spin. Clearly, no one wished to take in the dizzying view. A descent of four stories was tough on him, and he hooked his elbow around a rung somewhere between the third and second stories and, hanging, caught his breath.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  “Anything?” Bart Henry asked, arms crossed, heat creeping up his spine.

  “Nothing,” Sylvia Wu responded. “He’s vanished.”

  Donovan glared over her ice pack.

  “How is this possible? There are two hundred and thirty people in this habitat. No one has seen him? Where has he gone?” He slammed his fist onto the ops console and his phone jumped into the air. “Sylvia, is there some way we can monitor for unauthorized radio transmissions? Maybe he’s figured out a way to contact his ship other than using one of our transmitters?”

  Sylvia Wu sat and thought for a moment, puzzlement playing across her face before answering. “We can determine the distance of a transmission if we assume that we know the strength of the original signal, such as the output of a ship-phone, but we can’t decipher the packets. We won’t be able to tel
l what’s being said.”

  “I don’t care about what he’s saying, I want to know where he’s transmitting from.”

  “If he’s transmitting at all,” Donovan added.

  “And if he’s using a ship-phone at all, after all, we did confiscate his. If we don’t know the power of the transmitter for certain, then the estimate of the distance will be off.”

  “You need to put out a base-wide alert, Bart,” Donovan said.

  “And let the entire base population know?” Laskey exclaimed. “You know what that means?”

  “Yes, they’ll know we’ve been keeping things from them. You don’t think that some of them know that Ulysses is in orbit? You don’t think some of them saw the taxi lander come down?”

  Laskey’s stomach churned. It wasn’t that support for independence wasn’t felt in the hearts of most of the colony—but a rebellion? They were a cabal of the largest shareholding families and top base command, maneuvering to create a situation that, when it came to fruition, would unite the colony. That intended situation was not the one they found themselves confronting. They wanted the reaction of the mother companies to foment a full-scale revolt. But this situation—their own refusal to resupply the Ulysses as it hung in orbit—was not that. This was not a recipe for a united front. And worse, they had kept it from the colony at large. Laskey was smart enough to recognize they might be looking at a revolt of an entirely different kind as a result: a revolt by the general base population against them.

  “We can’t do that!” Laskey nearly screeched.

  “Agreed,” Bart Henry said, having made a similar assessment. “No base-wide alert. We’ll keep this quiet. He’s one man.”

  Henry avoided Donovan’s glare. “He hasn’t escaped the habitat or we’d know. He’s hiding somewhere.” With that, he picked up his base-phone and tapped the symbol for his security forces and repeated, “This is Base Commander Henry! Calvin Scott is still in the habitat. He’s hiding somewhere. Find him!”