Wine Dark Deep: Book One

by R. Peter Keith

  Cal sprang forward, with every bit of energy he could muster, pushing off through his feet and propelling himself across the floor to where he would hopefully intersect the arc of Bart’s backwards leap. He flung his arms and legs out wide and collided bodily with Bart Henry’s chest. The recoil sent him flying off at the opposite angle, and he hit the bay floor with another head-ringing impact.

  The base commander toppled backwards in a long arc. His life-support backpack snagged a spinning wall of tires—the leftmost of the initial set of accelerator wheel columns. The motion yanked him backwards at shocking speed. He hit the housing and pinballed across the track to the second set of accelerator wheels, and it was as if he was gone. Cal focused his attention on the lengths of track that had brutally flung Bart Henry nearly a quarter mile down a frictionless trail in the literal blink of an eye. His pinwheeling space suited form rose up the trough of one side of the track and careened off the side about halfway toward the end of the ramp.

  Cal bent to pick up a series of tags on a key ring that had fallen into the dust.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Xu Zuoren cultivated an air of calm rationality in every situation. Stress was a meditation. He checked the fit of the harness that held him in the leftmost couch at the nose of the expansively cramped interior of the Ulysses’s command module. This was the captain’s seat, and he was in charge. He had no desire to be there. He was here for the scientific journey of a lifetime. The last thing he truly wanted was to be in command of the overall mission, but it was his duty given the situation, and he would do his duty well. Samuels sat in the right-side couch, her displays configured for the piloting of the ship. Her fingers flitted over illuminated thrust, pitch, roll, and yaw angle sliders and dial icons. Her right hand did not leave the pistol grip translation controller.

  Floating behind them at a station facing toward the sides of the module, Inez sat strapped into her IT/comms station waiting for a—

  “Signal from the base!” she shouted.

  Cal’s bruised face appeared under a domed pressure helmet. The suit he wore looked ten years out of date.

  “Jesus, Cal.” she said. “What happened to you?” She switched the visual over to the main monitor that hung across the front of the module between its panoramic blister windows.

  “No time.” He shifted his weight like he was standing on uneven ground and tossed a key ring of access cards onto the console. A large gantry crane was moving in the background. “I’ve gotten two of the tankers launched already, but I can’t get access to their navigation systems. They’re flying dumb on suborbital trajectories. You’re going to have to turn their computers on or figure something else out.”

  Xu scrolled his telescope window, searching . . . There they were. Odysseus directed the passive radar over the glittering sparks. Their flight paths were added to the display. Two blips. Now three blips. They would rise to a height of about forty miles above the asteroid before following the parabola down to crash into Ceres.

  “Roger, Captain,” Xu said, already formulating the concepts of several somethings. “But what about you?”

  “I’m not sure, but I’ve got a couple ideas. Talk soon.” The screen went blank.

  Zuoren undid his restraints and floated out of his seat, rotating in place to face pilot Samuels and Inez at the same time. The doctor drifted into the room, with the centrifuge retracted and locked; her office was well within earshot.

  “Inez, you and Odysseus put all your efforts into figuring out if you can get access to the tankers’ computers. If not, I want to know, fast as you can.” He rotated to the pilot’s station and put his hand on her shoulder. “Sarah, I want you to come up with a plan to drop down and rendezvous with those tankers before they hit the ground. Between you and me, I don’t think we are going to be able to get into their computers.”

  “It’s going to use up the last of our fuel to put us into an orbit low enough to physically grab the tankers. An orbit that low is also a collision course with the surface unless we are successful retrieving at least one tanker.”

  “That’s why I’m asking you to practice.”

  “We are talking about real precision here.”

  “I don’t see a better alternative. We don’t have much time.”

  A fourth blip appeared on the display.

  “I don’t either. Slowing down and dropping to a descent orbit like that. It’s not going to leave a lot in reserve for corrections. And remember that when we slow down, we speed up. We’ve dropped in closer, so each orbit covers less and less actual miles. We’re going to have ever smaller intervals in which to capture and berth these tankers.”

  Paul Arthor, the engineer, added, “And the fuel cycling clamps will have to be working perfectly, of course.”

  “Right,” she said. “Assuming we pull this off, we will have very little time to sufficiently circularize our orbit with a series of burns.”

  “I’m worried about the stress on the arm.”

  “It can’t be helped. Assuming that we do not get through to their computers, we are literally only going to have one shot at this.” He looked at the crew. Cal’s crew. “The good news is that they will be lined up underneath us like a string of pearls. And there is a longer gap between the first of them and the other three, giving us extra time to analyze the first attempt.”

  “We can do it.” Samuels patted the control panel. “We’ll line up for retrieval and then use our last vestiges of fuel to swing us into an elliptical orbit that will intersect all of them.”

  Zuoren smiled at the rapidity of her planning. “This new orbit should bring us into contact, assuming the tankers stay on these parabolas, with the first tanker in seventeen minutes if we start procedure for the burn now.”

  He looked around the conical confines of the command module. “Anyone have anything to add?” No one said a word.

  “Our parabola will intersect the second tanker fourteen minutes after the first.”

  “So, the tank will have to be grabbed, berthed, and the arm maneuvered into position to grapple the second tank all within fourteen minutes?” The doctor gasped. “And less time to prepare for the third? Fourth?”

  Zuoren looked Samuels dead in the eye.

  “I can do it,” she said.

  “And if we don’t get all four?” the doc asked.

  “We don’t get Jupiter, but we can get home,” Samuels said.

  “So, bare minimum, we need to berth one of these tankers or we crash.”

  Arthor was already sailing down the hollow spine of ship, toward the docking ring and the band of windows that would allow a direct view while operating the arm, and down the tanker cradle, just in case he became disoriented by the camera views. He disengaged the control console so that it could freely ride the rail beneath the windows around the circumference of the docking ring and began to practice.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Cal stood with his hands on his knees and stared at the rocket tankers fading to glittering specks in the purple-black sky. He awarded himself a smile and then looked around. He was stuck on Ceres, but there was no reason he had to be stuck in the Accelerator complex. There had only been his four tankers, already fueled, awaiting the canceled launch. Obviously, the decision must have come late in the game. It would take time to fill an additional tanker, so there was nothing more he could do here except get caught.

  No, that wasn’t entirely true. The Accelerator was also a weapon. They’d be able to activate the complex as a matter of course and retask its tankers into missiles. The Accelerator wasn’t just a danger to his ship; Ceres could literally hit any point in the solar system with it, and what with so many orbits to search, a small object with such a shallow cross section in one dimension would be nearly impossible to spot.

  The thing to do was to destroy the facility, or at least put it out of action for a while. He picked up the tool cart and heaved it into the wheels. The cart snagged and jammed lightning-quick against the left bank
of metal wheel housings. The remaining tools spilled from the drawers to be swallowed and clatter horribly. Then the cart itself crumpled and was sucked inside to the accompaniment of horrible grinding vibration and gouts of flensed rubber being flung off down the track. The entire left-side bank of wheels ground to a halt. Cal was already off, bounding out to where he had initially parked his rover.

  As he loped along painfully, he thought about possible avenues of escape. There was the taxi lander, but they would surely have locked it down—and that could only ever have been of use if they’d refueled it as promised. Which was doubtful. There had to be more than one lander at the base, but they’d be guarded, and he hadn’t spotted any, regardless. Ulysses could fuel her own lander and send it down for him. No. The rapidity by which they had an automated rover meet him as he landed meant they couldn’t do the same again. The lander would be destroyed on the ground. Especially after what he’d done to the base commander’s rover. And to the base commander.

  The alternative was to make a last stand somewhere, or see if he could luck into finding another faction that was willing to help him. Certainly not all of the colonists were predisposed to revolution. Likely as not, though, he would end up back in the hands of Donovan’s friends: The first space Colonial Congress, or Space Politburo, depending on how the dice fell.

  Of course, there was the rover, and yet he hadn’t considered it. It was not the ideal tool for the problem, but it was the best tool at his disposal, and he had entirely overlooked it. Until now, he reminded himself.

  Cal reentered the rover through the roof hatch that he’d left open. He dropped into the seat below, thinking. He thought about trying to get into orbit the same way the tankers did, but even if he could figure out a way of stowing aboard a tanker, he doubted a human being could survive the g-forces launching from the Accelerator. Not without at least some form of restraint.

  Besides, he’d thrown a tool cart into it.

  Still thinking, Cal backed the rover out of the Accelerator complex’s garage, and the radar began to chirp an alert. On the horizon, glittering dust clouds were rising along the haul road. Multiple lights appeared. More base rovers were headed his way.

  He pushed the hand controller forward, and the rover sped from the complex and the approaching lights. To himself, as much as to Odysseus, he said, “If we pick up as much speed as possible, then with the aid of a nice rise or crater lip or other form of natural ramp . . . we could turn off the roof thrusters and gain some good altitude. It would take a long time for us to come down.”

  “When I overwrote the rover’s original AI, I removed all speed limitations and safeguards.” Odysseus displayed a white parabola, doing its best to extrapolate such possibilities. It was only generally accurate, but Cal could see that the rover would not be headed for a suborbital flight like the tankers. Not even close.

  “Odysseus, project the tanker’s flight path onto the HUD. I want to see it right through the windshield. Right in front of us. Ulysses, too.” If Ulysses is coming down to get the tankers . . . The flight path lines made glowing tracks right to the approaching dust clouds. The radar chirp picked up its pace. Further in the distance, the HUD accessed the laser altimeter database of Ceres and found some natural upthrust or mountain of slag that was his best option for gaining verticality and marked it on the map. “So, not only do we need to find more velocity somewhere but we’re also in just the wrong spot to try.”

  Odysseus overlaid a triangle on the landscape in front of the rover. One leg was the flight paths of the tankers, the next leg led to his current position, and the final leg described the path he would need to take and the distance he would need to cover to get the rover up to its maximum possible ground speed before he hit the slag pile at the right angle to arc him along the tanker flight path. He steered the rover out on a great looping turn over the ice sheets to head back in the correct direction. Chirp, chirp, chirp.

  Even as Cal streaked along his course, he looked at the display screen directly below the driver’s canopy and saw how much height he needed to gain and had no idea how he was going to get it. The chirping of the radar became a near constant tone, and out of the mists ahead, rovers appeared. He headed straight for them.

  “Where is he going?” Helen Donovan screamed as Cal’s rover passed between her and the other remaining base rover. The two twelve-wheeled vehicles slowed and turned in as sharp a curve as possible, rocking over on their golden suspensions and lifting their inboard wheels. Showers of ice-shod dust flew off the barrel wheels in surreal symmetry as they looped around to pursue.

  The birdsong of radar was whistling down. Cal hadn’t thought through that maneuver; he just picked a strategy and went with it. He was surprised it worked, but he had figured that Bart Henry was the most hard-charging guy on the base. If there was a type of person who would plot to take over the base for the riches or revolution, there weren’t going to be too many of them who were also the type to climb into a rover for a dangerous pursuit. Who else would have the guts to ram him? Only Donovan, and he was willing to bet that even if she was in one of those rovers, she wouldn’t be driving it herself. As a result, he had been fairly certain they’d veer off—and they did. He refocused on the HUD and the curve of Ulysses’s flight path drawn overhead. Back to the problem.

  He stared at the control panel. The roof thruster controls again caught his imagination. “Wait . . . Don’t turn the roof thrusters off. Use them! Use them to turn the rover upside down and fire them all for as long as they will burn. The thrusters weren’t very powerful, nothing like the magnitude of the lander’s twin engines, but they would keep them in the air a long time—put them on a bigger parabola. He thought about it. If he injected enough energy into their trajectory with the thrusters . . . No. Too much mass. The rover was too heavy. He’d be in the air a fairly long time, but he wouldn’t get close to even the anemic suborbital heights of the tankers.

  In his mind, he scanned the content and equipment of the rover to figure out what could quickly be torn out to lighten the load. The roll bar structure was heavy, but it had looked like it would take a long time to remove, and he didn’t have time. He locked the controls and opened the rover’s side hatch and began pitching out everything that wasn’t welded down. Tools, objects, and sample containers bounced and cartwheeled away from the barreling rover. He was exhausting himself, and the reality was that no matter how much he threw out, it wasn’t going to change the outcome. He latched the door closed and rushed back to the driver’s seat.

  Wisps of sublimating ice rose and fled from the passage of Cal’s speeding rover. Flames burst from roof thrusters in a continuous staccato, keeping the rover on the ground at such speeds. He was headed for the cracked slag piles ringing the mining craters. They rose at angles of at least thirty-five to forty degrees, he thought. He wouldn’t make orbit but he wouldn’t be finished either . . . And then he had another moment of relative calm as the rover’s speed crept higher and higher over the relatively smooth ice sheets. Again, he had an opportunity to scan the controls, recalling the meanings of icons, symbols, and abbreviations. And then he remembered that the rover could indeed be made lighter.

  Much lighter. The standard rover, used everywhere from the Moon to Ceres, was based off of a project from the turn of the century called Chariot or Small Pressurized Rover. It was a modular design.

  The birdsong of the radar began again.

  Behind him, the lights of the two rovers. He hadn’t lost them; in fact, they were slowly but surely gaining on him. It shouldn’t be the case; all these rovers were theoretically identical save for the loads they carried. He tabbed the screen over to the vehicle systems display and noted a litany of minor damage. One electric motor was completely out. The rest were operating at eighty percent capacity or above—which was pretty good for an electric vehicle subject to such extreme conditions, but the pursuing rovers were obviously performing better. They hadn’t been as terribly abused. He didn’t think they would c
atch up to him in time, but it would be close.

  Helen shouted, “There he is!”

  The driver pushed the vehicle harder; he knew the trick of overriding the battery safeguards and did so without being compelled. Doubtless no one else in the rover knew it was an option.

  Donovan looked at Rogers as the man tore at a strap Velcroed to a pouch on his hip. He withdrew what looked like a pistol that had been dipped in caramel. It looked like a gun because that is what it was. It was jacketed with translucent plastic the color of dark honey—an environmental control layer to manage temperature variations in space; protecting from cold so deep that it could cause the metal of the moving parts to stick together and jam, or heat so intense that the ammunition would explode. Bullets include their own oxidizer and so work perfectly in space.

  Donovan turned her head away, staring out at the taillights of Cal’s rover in the distance ahead of them.

  Cal’s rover shuddered over the surface; the path Odysseus had chosen was smoother than most but it was still a far cry from the laser-sintered smoothness of the haul road. He was dismayed by his rover’s condition. Could he possibly gain enough altitude to give himself any chance at all to be rescued? It seemed ridiculous, but he knew from experience in the one-sixth gravity of Earth’s moon that a rover could really be sent flying—and Ceres’s gravity was far weaker still. If he could get as much speed as possible, and if the crater rim resembled a ramp as closely as the AI estimated that it did, then he could split the rover in half!

  The rover was part of a modular system. Its undercarriage could be undocked from the pressure vessel, which comprised the cockpit and workspace designed for human beings. It was also where the thruster apparatus was mounted. He could drop the weight of the golden struts, wheels, and motors, rotate what remained, and fire the thrusters as long as possible. Fly as high as he could.