Wine Dark Deep: Book One

by R. Peter Keith

  Five minutes.

  He leapt off the rover in a graceful and extended arc, due to the low gravity, and landed on the deck of steel grating just in front of a door. A regular door, not an airlock. He opened and stepped inside the arching cylindrical space of the Accelerator building. This surprised him but, of course, the near-vacuum would be advantageous when dealing with flammables. He’d just never thought about it. He worried about what else he hadn’t thought of.

  Looking around the hangar-like space, Cal saw that there was simply no one there. There were pressurized miniature buildings like worksite trailers speckling the long walls, but behind the large plexiglass windows, the rooms he could see inside of were unoccupied. They weren’t sending anyone their fuel, so the staff obviously got the time off. He wondered if that meant they knew what was going on, or if it meant they didn’t.

  Five minutes wasn’t time for much. He bounced to the terminal that rose from the floor beside the yawning entrance doors that enabled the overhead crane to bring empty tankers inside. There was no phone dock, so Odysseus stayed in his pocket. He tapped the screen, and the accelerator queue appeared in graphic representation. He tabbed over to Refueling Procedures and attempted to take control of the crane, but all of the icons were grayed out except for the component heaters. He turned them on just in case, backed out to the menus, and tried to access refueling directly but again ran into the brick wall of grayed out controls.

  He bounced over to the still yawning door and looked out through the garage. There they were. The lights. Closer. He bounded back to the touchscreen station and tabbed to the main menu again. There it was. He had been rushing. The reason the crane and the refueling protocols were frozen was that the queue inside the Accelerator building was full. The answer was sitting right in front of his eyes. The tankers within the room were full—fueled. No more could be brought in until these were launched. He had wasted precious time. His eyes flew down the screen to the icon for the Accelerator motors themselves. They were full of color. Active. He smashed the icon, and the overhead crane lurched into action.

  He watched as the huge, yellow beam swept overhead. It looked nothing like a construction crane. It was a motorized girder that moved through the spine of the ceiling and dropped two lengths of claw-tipped steel cable as it slid over the first prone rocket tanker. The claws sought recessed attachment points along the tanker’s length and lifted it into the air as it retreated overhead, bringing the fueled tanker to the launch sled. A vibration swept across all of the surfaces of the room as the titanic, rubber wheels began to spool up, rotating slowly at first and then faster and faster. He looked back down at the touchscreen. From what he could tell the process would continue until he hit the STOP icon.

  Cal pulled his phone from his pocket. A clear signal.

  “Cal to Ulysses.”

  “Captain!” Inez’s voice crackled.

  “Listen, I don’t have much time. I’m in the Accelerator complex. I think I can get the tankers out. Stand by.”

  “Roger!”

  He slid his phone back into his pocket and hopped down from the control station. The crane stopped immediately, and the stacked wheels lost their momentum.

  It had a deadman’s switch—without an operator at the station the process would halt. He looked around; the bay was kept clean, much more orderly than the base garage. The only thing out of place was a tool cart directly across the room, drawers open as if abandoned mid-use. He wasn’t sure if it’s weight would be enough to trip the deadman’s switch.

  There wasn’t enough time.

  Light ringed the open doorway and briefly poured into the Accelerator bay. He hopped again to the doorway, concealing himself just to the side, and peeked out over the rim. An automated ore carrier, all wheels and golden carriage, cradling three hemispherical tanks, had rolled into the parking sled next to his rover and extinguished its running lamps. It shut down, awaiting some next step in its duty cycle. Over his right shoulder, he saw a familiar glimmer of light.

  A rover was clearly visible cresting the last of the dunes that ran up to the south side of the complex, following his tracks in. Ninety seconds. Maybe two minutes.

  He had to get the launch procedure going but . . . He shifted back out through the doorway and onto the garage deck and stared at the automated rover. There was an armored box mounted up front. The computer that connected to the undercarriage’s circuits to manage the motors and steering gear. On the very nose of the housing was a docking port protected by a pockmarked dust cover. He yanked the cover open and slid his phone into the dock. The phone was slightly larger than the space provided. Dust and grit had sifted through and made the fit even tighter. He glanced up at the approaching rover. Sixty seconds. He pushed, the ship-phone slid home, and Odysseus lit up on the carrier’s screen.

  “Odysseus, I need you to stop that rover. Bluff him if you can, ram him if you have to.”

  “I can’t purposefully collide with them, Captain.”

  “Yes, you can and you know it. The mission is at stake, the crew’s lives are at stake!” Cal shouted.

  “You’re right. I can,” the machine intelligence replied, and the rover immediately leapt backwards. He knew the AI wouldn’t put up much of a fight. Odysseus was the intelligence of a spaceship. It had already been through thousands of simulated missions, though nothing quite like this, and it knew there were circumstances that could require the sacrifice of a crew member to save the lives of others. The Captain knew his ship.

  Cal spared a brief glance as the carrier arrowed away toward the approaching rover. He bounded to the doorway and stumbled inside, turning one more time to see what was going to happen.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Bart Henry was strapped into the chair on the right side of the wingless-wasp’s cockpit when the resource carrier rounded the Accelerator building and headed toward them. Normally, a carrier wouldn’t ever leave the smooth surfaces of the haul roads. He prodded the pilot, who had already seen it. It was difficult to tell given the undulations of the surface and the pilot trying to keep them from sailing off the top of a dune, but it looked as if the carrier was moving to intercept them.

  “Keep trying to steer clear of it. If it’s been programmed to hit us, let’s figure it out sooner rather than later.”

  “Yes sir. Hold tight!” he yelled. The two other men, Mr. Laskey and a security man who until that morning had been a chemist in the analysis lab, braced themselves against the floor and ceiling. The rover’s system worked overtime to sync power to all twelve steerable wheels. Regardless, the front end had a tendency to rise during a turn, especially over rough terrain, and without the roof thrusters it would certainly have tumbled end over end. The carrier steered with them.

  “It’s faster than us,” the driver said. “And getting faster, look!” He pointed.

  The tank valves had been opened and were venting their contents. It wasn’t that the force of the escaping gas was adding so much to the vehicle’s velocity but that the mass of the carrier was decreasing by tons per second as the valuable separated hydrogen and oxygen gas bled into the near emptiness of Ceres’s troposphere.

  “I can’t lose it. I’m going to try and use the dunes to shield us and maybe get by him. Or under him.”

  The rover crested a dune and sped down its side, veering off into a serpentine pathway created by the regularly spaced dunes made up of castoff material. Thrown, deposited, or otherwise expelled from the huge digging machines. Seventy-plus years’ worth as first automated and then crewed mining projects bored into the asteroid, expanding the hills around the mining equipment in clusters of regular groupings.

  The driver took the rover on a snaking curve toward the Accelerator complex as the carrier continued bounding jarringly from dune to dune. Its headlights flashed wildly, and then were gone.

  “Where did it go?” Bart Henry’s head turreted from side to side. Radar was useless among the giant mounds of slag. The rover swerved suddenly, roof
thrusters squealing.

  “Introducing a little randomness.” The driver smiled.

  A flash of light. A red glow from— “Behind us!” Laskey was looking out the small viewports in the backpack-shaped airlock doors leading to the rear deck. Descending backwards down the dune they were skirting, was the carrier, its brake lights shining crimson in the near dark. The driver yanked the controller hard to his left, and their rover veered up the embankment, curving up and back down again, gaining momentum before careening across the trough between dunes and up the other side.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Cal stared out across the dunes. The carrier had disappeared into a gulley, shutting off its lights. A few seconds later, the pursuers’ rover crested and rounded a dune much like a surfer who fails to catch a wave properly. Behind it followed the carrier, varying its curving path just slightly. There was a glittering shower of slow-motion snowflakes.

  Cal caught his breath. Both vehicles tumbled together, cartwheeling over the dome of slag. A glinting gold barrel-wheel bounced away in great but diminishing arcs. Disturbed dust boiled upwards and outwards, sparkling debris arced through the near vacuum.

  He turned and reentered the Accelerator building, crossing the complex floor with just four hops. Grabbing the railing, he leapt and pulled himself down quickly onto the floor’s deadman’s switch. The wheels of the accelerator began spinning again. The overhead crane jerked into motion, causing the rocket tanker to sway back and forth, but as the crane slid forward, the tanker lowered neatly to the sled and clicked down, ready to be slung down the track. The process hesitated. A window popped open on the touchscreen: Tanker Computer Complex inactive. Enter Startup Menu? [Y/N]

  Cal hesitated for a moment.

  The kinetic accelerator alone would never push them to Ceres’s orbital velocity of 1140 miles per hour. To achieve that speed a tanker would need a burst of thrust from its main engine, and for that to happen the computer would have to be enabled. That was not something Cal was prepared to do. First, he had no clear idea how to accomplish that and second, he no longer had his ship-phone to rewrite its native AI. It was possible that once their computers were active, Ceres Base could take control of the tankers and turn them into guided missiles. Ulysses would be a sitting duck. Heck, it would be a duck rushing to meet the bullets.

  It was true that the Accelerator couldn’t put the tankers into orbit, but they’d push them hard enough to make a very long suborbital arc, maybe even a series of spiraling arcs before crashing. He would have to hang his hopes squarely on his belief that Samuels, Zuoren, and the ship-bound Odysseus would be able to drive the Ulysses down hard, slowing and dropping its orbit to snag the tankers. There would be no room for error in order to berth them against the howling stresses and then, possible at all only because of the planetoid's weak gravity and by burning the excess fuel they had gained by the tankers not having fired their engines in order to regain orbit.

  He hit N, and the sled pushed the rocket tanker forward so that it reached the spinning wheels traveling the proper speed. The tanker was grabbed by the friction of the giant rubber tires and was, shockingly, gone. In an instant it was hundreds of feet away. Barreling down the track, gaining momentum, hitting the sub-accelerators and then flying up the incline and off the track onto the long sloping sub-orbital course that he hoped would bring it within the Ulysses’s grasp.

  The sled moved backwards in time with the retreat of the crane. The huge, yellow girder swept overhead to capture the next fueled tanker in the queue.

  He reached for his phone before remembering that it had been on the nose of the carrier that smashed into the base rover. He could use the comms system in the console, he thought. Probably. He tabbed through to Comms. It was grayed out. Locked. He had to hope they’d figure it out, or all of this would be for nothing.

  The second tanker swung overhead.

  Or he could contact them through the rover. Odysseus was already installed on its computer. He would have control of its transmitter. Cal’s eyes flitted to the tool cart. If he could trip the deadman’s switch with the weight of the cart, the process would continue, their fuel tankers would be launched, and meanwhile, he could contact the Ulysses and ensure them the maximum time to respond to the tankers’ suborbital trajectories.

  He jumped down, the crane stopped, and the tire speeds began to slow. He bounded over to the tool cart and gripped it by the handle as a dark, hulking shape appeared, framed by the doorway.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Bart Henry stood hunched over in the doorway. There was blood and spittle flecked across the dome of his helmet, his lip swollen and bloody. He was gripping his left shoulder with his right hand. Duct tape was wrapped a number of times around his left thigh. There were what looked like scorch marks all along the length of his suit’s left arm and the left side of his life-support backpack appeared crumpled. His left glove was balled into a fist and shaking.

  “Laskey and everyone else in the rover are dead.” He began to raise that balled fist. “And for what? Science?”

  “Or money,” Cal countered.

  “Independence,” the bigger man grumbled.

  Cal looked into Henry’s eyes, but all he saw was anger.

  “How did you get the carrier to do that, Cal?”

  “C’mon Bart, self-driving vehicles decide who they are going to kill all the time. Every time there’s an accident.” He backed away a step. “Do I kill the guy in this car or the busload of schoolchildren? How long have you been out here? You haven’t had an emergency where the AI trapped people behind airtight doors? At our level you can ask them anything, and they’ll do it—if it fits within their rule sets.”

  “No different than having the key to the firearms locker, huh?”

  “No different than you and me.”

  Bart stepped forward, out of the doorway and began to descend the metal stairs rather than leap through the weak gravity. Cal observed his movements, wounded as he was. The big man was measured and predatory. Cal tapped keys on his arm pad and boosted the percentage of oxygen to nitrogen in his life-support mixture. The two of them were now sidestepping slowly in the center of the bay floor, ranging around the tool cart.

  “What’s your fucking problem, Cal?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why couldn’t you just join us? You’d have been rich.”

  “Why couldn’t you just send me my fuel?”

  Henry grimaced and spat blood into his helmet, and in the same instant swept out with his right and propelled the tool cart toward Cal. The toolbox on top spun off at him, wobbling end over end in the low gravity, spilling smaller tools as it went. Cal was caught completely by surprise, both by the distraction and the speed of the punch, and then nearly knocked senseless by twin concussive impacts.

  Cal opened his eyes, and he was on his side, bumping slowly against the floor. The tool cart bounced off the railing ringing the bay floor. Base Commander Henry hopped backwards slightly to absorb the rebound of a punch so filled with momentum that items spilled from his Velcro pocket. Sparkling pinpricks floated across Cal’s vision, every tenth or so ember exploded into a starburst of pain.

  “Isn’t that just something, Cal? I have to admit that I just love it. I’ve only had occasion to punch someone wearing a pressure helmet once before. It’s amazing, feeling it through the punch. My fist hitting your face shield, and your head hitting the inside of your helmet.”

  Cal scrambled, kicking up arcs of dust that fell in slow motion at his side. He nearly flew forward but managed to catch himself and bob upright. Henry’s next swing came fast. Much faster than he expected. He yanked himself out of the way of the pistoning glove and punched, throwing his right fist forward from the hip. They tangled for a moment as the wall of Bart Henry’s mass continued on toward him and then recoiled from one another. As they parted, Cal’s head rocketed back with the impact of an unseen strike. Henry bounced backwards, landing and bobbing on the balls of his boo
ted feet.

  Cal blinked twice during a reverse hop and found himself backed up against the safety railing, his hand against the handle of the tool cart. Bart angled a few sliding steps closer, careful to keep himself from hopping onto a slow, and predictable arc. Cal circled the bay floor in the opposite direction, heading toward the crane operator’s station. Bart Henry stopped moving and sized up the situation. At his feet was a low-G wrench complete with leverage armatures. He reached down and picked up the heavy tool.

  Cal propped himself up against the railing and caught his breath. He was right underneath the section of deck where the touchscreen station and deadman’s switch were located. His head hurt. If Henry hit him with that wrench even once, he was likely finished. Cal had to get inside the reach of the big man’s swing. Despite years of service in space, this was the first time he’d ever been in a fight in microgravity. He had to remind himself that even though things appeared as if they were moving more slowly than normal, this was an illusion. A dropped item takes longer to fall to the ground. Propelled items, like a rocket or a fist, moved as fast as ever. Or faster.

  Base Commander Henry raised the wrench. Behind him hung the second refueling tanker, frozen in the act of being lowered to the sled beyond.

  Cal braced himself and grasped the legs of the tool cart with his gloved hands. He heaved, stars splitting behind his eyeballs, and lifted the tool cart up over his head. Bart froze for a moment and then instinctively hopped backwards to avoid the danger, but Cal didn’t throw. He dropped the tool cart behind him. It clattered down and jammed between the touchscreen station and the safety railing, tripping the deadman’s switch. The crane immediately began to move. The fueled tanker descended to the sled and clicked in. The great wheels spun up with a smooth rising vibration that rippled out across the bay floor.