Wine Dark Deep: Book One

by R. Peter Keith

  Donovan grimaced and shifted the position of her ice pack.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Cal continued his descent without incident. Nearing the bottom of the ladder, he released his grip and drifted down the last ten feet or so, allowing the weak gravity to slow the momentum he had gained from the spinning centrifuge. He hit the dark floor of the casement building and slow-motion rolled away from the spinning habitat.

  His perceptions shifted one hundred and eighty degrees. It was now obvious that the casement building was standing still, and it was the habitat that was rushing by. Slightly dizzy, he wobbled to his feet and shuffled up against the stationary wall, away from the spinning turbine of the hab. Looking around, the wall was a simple corrugated structure like the inside of an old barn as opposed to the interior of an asteroid base millions of miles from Earth. Almost at the opposite end of the wall was a cluster of lights—red and white. He moved toward it, through dust motes that swirled and flashed in the dark as they caught light leaking from the centrifuge. The lights revealed an airlock exit and a surface suit locker. He examined them before disturbing anything. It looked as if nothing had been touched in a while, and neither the door nor the storage locker was secured in any way. No locks, and why would there be?

  He opened the locker door. Inside were three surface suits in different colors—yellow, red, and blue. Designed for maximum visibility. Unfortunately, he thought. He pulled the blue suit from its hanger frame, figuring it was the least egregiously visible, and checked the maintenance tag. The last check was three months overdue. Neglectful, but the suit’s battery and O2 levels were in the green. He unzipped the garment and slid in, zipping it up to the waist and reaching down to fasten the boot clasps around his ankles before shouldering his arms in and zipping it to the neck ring. Cal pulled a set of gloves off the top shelf and fastened them to the attachment rings at the wrists. Finally, he settled the helmet over his head and clicked it into the neck ring, ratcheting over the clamp to seal it. Lights in the helmet dome cycled through yellow to green, indicating a good seal, and conditioned air began to hiss into the helmet. He slipped his ship-phone into the dock on his left forearm and heard the tone indicating that the suit was linked to the phone’s system. Odysseus spoke up. “I’ve deleted the AI routines present in the suit and installed my own as a precaution.” Cal didn’t bother to respond but reached out for the airlock handle and hesitated. If there was anything that would alert the base personnel to his whereabouts it would be the opening of an airlock door.

  “Odysseus, is there any way they might be able to trap me in that airlock?”

  “It’s possible, Captain. But it would be unlikely for them to have installed such precautions in a facility such as this.”

  Cal examined the door; it looked as basic as an airlock could be. Simple, manual, and with a minimum of systems to maintain or fail. He looked at the matrix of red and green lights over the doorframe that would indicate whether it was safe to enter. Simple or not, when this door opened, someone somewhere would know.

  Briefly he wondered if opening the door might trigger a temporary indicator that would cease the moment it closed again—or whether the airlock would trigger a full alert as it cycled. He quickly decided that it didn’t matter, gripped the inset handle, and twisted as the door swung out to within a few feet of the centrifuge. An array of lights chased one another on the wall above.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “Airlock opened! Casement building, garage exit!” Wu shouted excitedly. Henry snatched up his base-phone so quickly that it leapt out of his hand, and he had to reach for it and snatch it again. “Security to Casement Airlock G! Security to Casement Garage Airlock! Detain Captain Scott at all costs! Quickly! Quickly!”

  Henry turned and rushed from the Ops Turret. Donovan followed, clutching her ice pack, and Laskey bustled up behind her. They propelled themselves down the companionway against the low gravity. Walkway lights lining the wall skirts phased to red like in a sci-fi movie. She had never seen that happen before.

  At the first corridor junction, they met with a jumpsuited crew of security men. Not a regular team; their mismatched jumpsuits made that clear. Emergency protocols had pulled individuals from various work details. They approached the hub and all crammed into the elevator together. Bart Henry reiterated his orders to the ersatz security men in an increasingly urgent way that subtly eroded the confidence and mood of everyone in the elevator. Despite the vanishing gravity and the subtle Coriolis effect on her gut, Donovan felt compelled to open her mouth, voice muffled by the swelling in her cheek.

  “Captain Calvin Scott is a spy acting against our best interests,” she said, speaking to the motley security detail. “He is dangerous, having already attacked a member of the senior staff—me—but he is only one man. He must be stopped.”

  At this, Henry seemed to snap out of his funk. “He’s opened Airlock G, although he might have done this just to throw us off his trail.” He paused, thinking. “Still, my guess is that he is headed for a lander. When we hit the ground floor, head for your suit lockers and assemble outside. I want one person examining each rover in the garage bay. Donovan, Laskey, and I will try and discern fresh tracks beyond the bay.” He looked at Helen. “You up for the outside?” She nodded.

  He tapped his base-phone, squeezing his bulky forearms up between the bodies crowding the dark elevator. “Base Commander to Vehicle Operations. I want every rover on the base shut down remotely. I don’t care if they are in motion. Stop them where they are. Once that’s done, I want a lockout put on all landers, including, and especially, the taxi lander on pad four. Henry out.”

  Chapter Thirty

  The atmosphere evacuated, the pressure equalized, and the outer door opened onto the garage—a corrugated roofed structure open on two sides. A row of electric rovers hunkered beneath sodium lights. Outside, the asteroid’s surface sparkled in an eternal twilight. An odd mist hung about the ground in seemingly random spots, and the spires of the ice-cracking facility rose up through them. Out in the courtyard, silhouetted against the green glow from one of the domed farms in the distance, an automated carrier vehicle trundled past. It had the same golden undercarriage as the rovers, but there was no cockpit or crew cabin, just a framework of girders enclosing three large globular storage tanks. It rode past, fine dust swept up and over its twelve barrel-tires and flew off in sheets.

  Cal couldn’t resist. He had to stop for a second to take in the panorama and think about where he was. The stars shone in the sky, as many as could be seen from deep space, but the thin sheath of gas and dust that hung around Ceres imparted an extra bit of magic—the stars on the asteroid twinkled.

  His head jerked to the left within the bubble domed helmet to look back at the wingless-wasp shapes of the rovers sitting under the corrugated roof. “Odysseus, the rovers . . . can you overwrite their OS’s with yours?”

  “Not without a physical connection. Their network safeguards are fairly tight,” the machine intelligence replied.

  Cal bounded over toward the rover. He was used to the characteristic bounding hops for low-gravity environs like the Moon—but Ceres’s gravity was much less than that. He was at the side of the first rover in only two bounds, colliding with its cold exterior and rebounding, nearly losing his balance and toppling over. He gripped the recessed handle of the hatch door, and it swung open. Electronic safeguards tight as a drum, physical safeguards almost nonexistent. Made sense . . . The base’s e-landscape was as vulnerable as any in the solar system, but the nearest nosey neighbor was hundreds of millions of miles away.

  The interior lights of the rover winked on as he lifted himself in through the central hatch, pulling it closed and moving into the cockpit. He settled into the seat beneath the wasp’s left bubble eye and slid his ship-phone into the dock. Odysseus booted and the rover’s interior lights guttered out, flared, and guttered out again before blinking back and staying lit.

  “OS rewritten.”

>   The HUD spread itself across the canopy windshield, and the familiar modular interface illuminated the touchscreen. There was no sound as the six motors came online, but the vehicle immediately lurched into motion at the touch of the hand controller. A squeeze of the trigger and the vehicle moved into reverse. Clicking the trigger to the right and moving the mini-stick under his thumb made all six wheel-pairs pivot ninety degrees, and the Rover crab-walked sideways out of the garage and into the dark, starlit base grounds. The ground was incredibly flat—having been bulldozed and laser-sintered into a compact and concrete-like landscape, which constituted the floor of an arcade defined by the habitat structures and farm domes. A maze of pipes and tubes ran absolutely everywhere, between buildings, over the buildings, diving into the ground and rising elsewhere into towers of sodium-lit pipeworks.

  “Odysseus, give me a waypoint for the Accelerator,” Cal said. A green marker appeared on the HUD, bobbling at a point just over the misty horizon.

  “Thank you.”

  The Accelerator was the first step in getting Ceres’s great wealth off of its surface and on to where it was needed and valued. Thanks to the laws of celestial mechanics once in orbit, every point in the solar system could be reached by expending roughly the same amount of energy. The only difference would be transit time.

  Because even the most rapid of space flights was usually planned out months or years (or decades) in advance, the price of goods would be entirely determined by the cost of getting them into orbit. A gravity field weak enough to make it easy to fling objects off into space, yet strong enough to enable humans and machines to perform work more easily than in zero-G, was exactly what made Ceres the treasure world that it was. The Accelerator took maximum advantage of this situation to get the goods into space as cheaply as possible in a way that seemed comically low-tech.

  Cal rotated the rover’s wheels to switch into forward motion and pushed on the control stick. An audible whine could be heard, and a vibration shook the entire structure as the rover swept up toward its maximum velocity. He steered down the arcade and off the heat-formed road, into the dunes.

  The roads that led to the Accelerator complex were designed for easy access from the ice-mining site, not the base itself. He had noticed during his long descent from orbit, they zig-zagged up the crater wall in great switchbacks. Taking the long way around in order to make a nice, safe haul road. He was leaving that road, taking a shortcut across the natural terrain. Instantly, the rover began pleading with him. “Excessive battery drain—damage possible.” A pause. “Excessive tire wear—damage possible.” He ignored it. The rover bounced over the dunes. Without the constant firing of the roof thrusters pushing one end or the other down toward the terrain, it would have already shot skyward or flipped end-over-end as the front wheels pushed up off the ground and rose, while the rear wheels kept propelling the back of the vehicle along and eventually underneath the front.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Bart Henry stepped out onto the surface just as the taillights of Cal’s rover vanished from the far end of the arcade. He fumed but didn’t waste time on it. He pointed at the remaining rovers, but his security detail was already clambering aboard and lighting them up, detaching them from their base access tunnels. Donovan watched Henry’s bulk vanish into the closest rover, Laskey hurrying in behind him, and she deliberately boarded one of the others.

  She was aggravated; they could have merely exited the base directly into the rovers and onto Cal’s tail, perhaps even intercepting him before he got out of the garage. But Cal had exited through an airlock, and in the rush to pursue, none of them had thought of doing anything but dashing off to follow him. Not Bart and, of course, not Laskey. Not even her. She cursed herself and all of them. Calvin Scott the most.

  Each rover glided out sideways and turned almost ninety degrees as they shifted in turn into forward motion and shot down the arcade toward the haul roads.

  Donovan shared her rover with a driver whom she hadn’t seen enter. He was an overweight and youngish fellow whose face she recognized but whose name she wouldn’t have known if it wasn’t emblazoned on the left breast of his suit. He was a Rogers. The “we own over twelve percent” Rogers. Not that this made him any more or less special than the next guy. Everyone was related to someone on Ceres. Everyone had a piece of the pie.

  Rogers unlatched and twisted his helmet to release it from his suit’s neck-ring and swung himself into the right-hand cockpit seat. Donovan weighed the oxygen and power usage against the added safety of having her own secure air supply, and left her helmet on. She braced herself against the sides of both seats and straddled the cockpit aisle as they left the arcade and sped over the haul road, toward the mine. “Why would he be headed to the mining facility?” she said, thinking aloud.

  Henry must have been monitoring her comms because he answered, “Maybe he’s looking for another way to reach his ship? Does he know someone on the Mining and Cracking side?”

  A chill ran down her back, followed by a rush of sweat. Dear God, she thought. She hadn’t even bothered to check on his connections to others on the base apart from herself and those involved in talking with or guarding him. “I-I don’t know,” she stammered.

  “You don’t know?” Henry’s voice crackled as the rover leaned into the first S-curve on the zig-zagging haul road. “You were the one that was so insistent on how dangerous he was! Do you mean to tell me that despite your conviction, you failed to plan for him to actually do something?”

  So focused was she on trying to preempt Cal that she failed to even consider how to deal with the chaos he might bring. “I tried to get you to shoot him down. I told you. Once he got here it was already too late.”

  “That’s your excuse?”

  Donovan remained silent for a moment, upset, but then her head seemed to instantly clear. “Wait . . .” she said.

  “What?”

  “Why is he here? Why did he come down?”

  “What?”

  “He’s here for his fuel!”

  “The Accelerator!” Henry yelled.

  Her rover’s pilot jerked in his chair and jammed the joystick backward to brake. “Jesus!”

  Donovan pitched forward, losing her grip on Roger’s seat bolster and stumbling forwards. Roger’s arm shot up to steady her. Through the bubble canopy, she could see the rear of Henry’s rover light up red as the vehicle veered off the haul road and skirted a fractured and upthrusted rock formation to head toward the dunes.

  “Stay on the road!” Donovan barked to the pilot, who looked at her quizzically. “He could be wrong. We stay on the road. If Captain Scott is headed for the mine, we’ll catch up with him. If he’s going for the Accelerator, then the base commander will get him.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  The Accelerator complex rose up over the horizon, bracketed by massive cantilevered sheafs of rock and ice angling skyward. The complex consisted of two primary but dissimilar structures. A squat cylindrical building lying on its side, half-buried in the regolith and—projecting from the far end of the cylinder—a cantilevered launch-way that rose up over at least a mile of track, supported by an illuminated scaffold framework that reminded Cal of a roller coaster at night. Snaking up the scaffolding at regular intervals were the ever-present pipes and tubing that carried power and communications to the secondary accelerator housings. Beyond the buildings yawned the crater.

  After the ice was mined from primeval inclusions deep in the crater and then “cracked” into hydrogen and oxygen, it was gathered in tanks. Then it was pumped into the two hundred and fifty-foot-long rocket tankers that could deliver the resources to any point in the solar system. The empty tankers stood in file, waiting to be grabbed by the gantry crane—basically a motorized pillar that would extend from the building, clasp a tanker, and then retract with it into the cylinder’s depths. Inside, the crane would lower the rocket onto the refueling and launch cradle where the various tanks contained within would be pumped
full and then drawn toward the Accelerator device itself.

  Comically low-tech in the broad strokes, the Accelerator, he knew, would be a colossal version of a Hot Wheels playset. Banks of massive, horizontally mounted, rubber tires spun at tremendous rates and would grip the tanker and fling it down the launch ramp. The ramp’s track itself was charged and magnetically repelled the tanker such that resistance and friction were nearly eliminated. Downstream sub-accelerators added to the tanker’s momentum such that only the briefest of firing of the tanker’s own engine would be enough to place it into orbit. At the right moment, another short burn would pull it entirely out of Ceres’s anemic grasp and fling it away on its own rendezvous orbit to wherever and whenever.

  He pored over the rear camera view. Light traveled a great distance unobstructed in brief atmospheres like this one. There was definitely a glow out there, seemingly flashing on and off. Most likely the headlights of pursuers moving up, over, and down the dunes.

  He veered off to the right to circle the building and see if he could find an easy way inside. Rounding the building at the far end of the ramp, he found its opposite side open with a garage overhang similar to the one he’d left at the habitat. The lights were on, but there was nobody home. Every single bay was empty. His rover rocked, spilling dust from recesses in the hood and canopy frame, as he drove it into the first bay and over the brushes that would clean the rover’s undercarriage and charging contacts. He slid it up onto the parking skid, pulled his ship-phone off the dock and went up and out through the top hatch this time.

  Cal stood on the roof of the rover and looked out across the dunes. The flashing lights were still out there. Getting closer. It had to be a rover. Five or six minutes behind him. Maybe ten if they took a circuitous route through the dunes to spare the rover. Maybe twenty if they took it too hard and broke something.