Wine Dark Deep: Book One

by R. Peter Keith

  How much of the mass of the rover did the undercarriage represent? At least fifty percent . . . Could that be enough? Could the thrusters impart enough additional velocity given the lessened mass? To be able to escape the planetoid’s gravity? Doubtful. Probably impossible. But he might manage something approaching a suborbital flight. If he did, and headed in exactly the right direction . . . If Ulysses realized what he was up to . . . If everything just went according to plan . . . for once.

  How could it? Would they even think to try?

  If not . . .

  In any case, it would be a unique experience.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  The Ulysses pirouetted. It rotated end over end to position its huge main engine in opposition to their direction of travel. Thrust applied along this vector would slow them down, pulling them closer to Ceres and into faster and faster orbits. The main engine belched a torrent of luminous exhaust for a short time and quieted. Slowing down to speed up.

  Samuels flicked her screen and a light turned off. Instantly, the four empty rocket tankers were ejected, tumbling away from the giant spacecraft. They would have enough propellant left in the system for limited maneuvering, but they needed to refuel or they were dead.

  Ulysses was dropping, falling into the planet, barreling into the tenuous mists that Ceres called an atmosphere. The ship spun its nose forward again, positioning itself for the burn of the main engine that they assumed they would make in order to escape certain destruction. The burn they could make only after retrieving the tankers.

  Samuels was slung in her seat. Her helmet and gloves on and locked, like everyone else onboard, monitoring their descent. It was a parabola that would bring the tankers within reach of the eighty-foot-long arm. A few blips of the main engine to slow the ship and expand the orbit. She should be able to keep them in sync with the path of the tankers long enough for Arthor to grab and berth them in the cradle. She watched the radar screen and the four blips ahead that represented their fuel.

  In Blue Habitat, locked in against the centrifuge arm’s hub, the doctor looked out of the great, triangular windows. They were down low. Far lower to a world, even the Moon, than she had ever expected to see from these windows. Thank goodness for Ceres’s minuscule gravity. Her forest green spacesuit was reflected in the window pane, and she was distracted by reflections in her helmet bubble when the ship’s cradle began to rotate, and the giant boom-like arm unfolded and extended into the void as if stretching after a long sleep. So far from the sun, the darkness was vast and speckled with stars.

  On the surface, as her jouncing rover pulled incrementally closer to Calvin Scott’s speeding vehicle, Helen Donovan watched the glittering string of lights in the sky. It was obvious that the bright new star was the interplanetary ship and that the smaller, glittering train was—something else. She imagined that, somehow, Cal had managed to launch his refueling tankers, although she still held out hope that they had been launched by Bart and Laskey, following some strategy she had never been privy to, and had been repurposed into missiles.

  Ulysses was approaching the first tanker at its apogee, snagging it at its highpoint. The others would be caught after their arc had turned back down toward the ground. The tankers were inert, and so the running lights that usually illuminated them were absent. The doc was an old hand at having nothing to do during a refueling procedure, and so she had become an expert in spotting approaching tankers, but this was a new challenge. The ship was bathing them in radar, of course, but the only way she would see the darkened cylinders would be as a shadow sliding through the stars or over the blue-gray asteroid.

  Arthor ran his hand over the movable panel. He grasped the hand controller and switched active control to the shoulder joint, pivoting the entire folded arm out to the side. He tabbed to the elbow joint and unfolded the arm to its full length. The arm’s distant end, with its grasping electromagnetic manipulators, stretched out almost eighty feet. Searchlights flicked on from the docking ring and swept the darkness. “There!”

  The first tanker differentiated itself from the void. The doc watched search beams from the ship play over the egg-white skin of the tanker rocket as the darkness slid from its surface like a liquid. The arm, and therefore the ship, was nearly perfectly positioned for the rendezvous. The grasping claws skimmed just feet from its exterior. So close that the red and white lights flashing on the clawed manipulator were clearly reflected in the tanker’s passing flank. The wrist rotated downwards and gently bridged the distance. Magnets clunked against the skin of the tanker as the claws found their homes in the grappling recesses running up and down its length.

  Instantly the arm sprang into motion, swinging over at the shoulder in an arc that turned the tanker rocket entirely around. Arthor twisted the controller and the wrist curled inward, drawing the tanker parallel to the long axis of the fully extended arm. In a single move, the tanker was aligned with the carousel and cradle, which rotated into the proper position to receive. It left the arm with a vibratory clunk that ran through the ship. The momentum carried the fueled tanker directly into the huge, hemispherical claws of the cradle.

  The doc tabbed the engineer’s com channel. “Wow. What was that move?”

  Her HUD made his face appear to float in the air a few feet from her. He smiled. “It’s not safe, but it is fast. It’s a lot of stress on the arm, but I figure we can get away with it three more times.” He checked the alignment and adjusted the pressure on the clamps. An armature capped with hoses and other connections extended automatically and integrated the tanker into the ship’s fuel and consumables supply chain.

  In the command module, Samuels held up her index finger. One of Four.

  The ship was moving faster than she’d estimated. Seven minutes to the next.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Through the cockpit’s side windows, Cal could see the noses of the two remaining base rovers drawing up close again on either side of him. Swerving, spraying showers of glittering dust, trying to make Cal deviate, to make him lose some of the momentum he had been struggling to gain these last miles, and pull ahead of him. All of his rover’s indicators were in the red, but it couldn’t be helped. This was its final run.

  Donovan rode in the bucking rover to the left of Cal’s fleeing machine. She glanced up again at the remaining string of three lights headed into the orbit of the new star—the Ulysses. There was no aurora of debris glittering around the star after the first light had disappeared. It had obviously been safely captured and integrated into the ship. She was seeing the Ulysses refuel.

  She stared ahead out of the bulging windows of the faceted wasp-shaped rover. Cal shot over the ice sheets just ahead and off to the right, spinning a trail of churning dust that merged with the wakes of his pursuers and hung in the air for miles behind. They were so close their windshield wipers and electrostatics struggled to keep the view ahead clear, but every maneuver to try and slow him down short of actual collision bled off their gains.

  She wasn’t about to try and nudge him. These weren’t like terrestrial vehicles; the rovers’ complex undercarriages with their multiple independent suspension arms and dual wheels would tangle up, and the resultant clash of momentum in the low gravity would almost surely send them into a deadly tumble. She fantasized about Cal Scott’s demise but never at the cost of her own life.

  What is he up to? she wondered. Was he actually trying what she thought he was trying? At first, she had imagined he was planning to ram the Accelerator. But he was headed toward nothing: away from the base, away from the mining site, away from the Accelerator. Did he just not want to be captured? Did he want to get away and die out there on his own terms? To vanish? To make himself legendary? Or could he possibly be thinking . . .? She could see the outline of him in the cockpit and thought about Rogers and his gun.

  “Chief Donovan?”

  She turned to the pilot.

  “There’s about fourteen miles of nothing ahead of us—and then the sla
g fields.”

  The rover to Cal’s right veered in again as if to collide, but he held steady. He had made up his mind that his best tactical strategy was to just keep going fast and straight. If they veered into him, there was nothing he could do. Things were going to happen the way they were going to happen, now. In life, as with celestial mechanics, as with the movement of worlds and spaceships, the die was often cast long before the moment of truth. He peered over the controls screen and looked up at Ceres’s sky. “Ulysses, can you read me? I’m thinking you should be catching some fly balls right about now.” The speaker crackled, but there was no response. Although . . . he thought.

  Cal Scott always reserved the right to second-guess.

  Cal realized that the rover to his left hadn’t deviated from its course in miles. It hadn’t swerved or otherwise threatened. It just angled in gently and was now pulling even with him about twenty feet off his rover’s left flank. It’s starboard side airlock door slid open at the vehicle’s midline. Just inside the airlock doorway, dust spattering against her pale red spacesuit and bouncing off her helmet, was Helen Donovan. He knew it was her before he could confirm with his eyes that it was her face under the dome; he could tell by the way she moved. She was standing in the side airlock door of the pursuing rover, holding on to a handrail and bracing her feet against the floor. He admitted that though he’d imagined it, he never really thought she would come after him herself.

  Cal decided to reach out, “Odysseus, comms.” A Quindar tone sounded. “Helen?”

  Static and then, finally a tone. “What are you up to, Cal? Where is there to go?”

  “You know I like a drive, Helen.”

  “So, you won, Cal. I can’t believe it, but you did. Ulysses is getting its tankers. But now what? What for you?”

  “I’m going to try and get to my ship, Helen.”

  Donovan hesitated a moment, noting the stark landscape speeding by them. “Go ahead, Cal.” She laughed, half in admiration. “Give it your best shot.”

  Helen slid the lock door shut and moved into the cockpit. She put her hand on the driver’s shoulder and tabbed the comm link to both rover cockpits. “He’s headed for the slag shelf. We are just going to escort him in and make sure he doesn’t try and make a run for it. We’ll wait till the last minute and then peel off to make sure he goes through with it.”

  Chapter Forty

  The next tanker unexpectedly appeared out of the gloom. Wrong angle. Ulysses was out of position. Samuels bathed the tanker with its radar again, confused. The tanker was still on a suborbital parabola but out of line with the previous. A result of the chaotic launch conditions no doubt, but the arm was poised halfway into the abyss, pointing off in the wrong direction. Samuels burped the main engine and stretched their orbit slightly. The arm descended. The tanker was lower than expected, falling below the midline of their ship. Paul Arthor switched the axis of control over the shoulder joint and then the first elbow, then the second, to snake the arm beneath the ship and grab it rather than have Ulysses perform a roll. Why waste fuel when they didn’t know where their next meal was coming from? He could miss, of course. That was always a possibility even in the best cases. The arm could collide with the tanker, and it could be sent spinning off into space or to hit the ship.

  Odysseus kept a close eye on the movement of the tanker, constantly adjusting the position of the centrifuge ring to rotate the habitats around into the safest position.

  Arthor had to play a little catch up, traversing the grappling head along to follow the moving tanker, in hopes to grab it where it would be most effective. Gripping it elsewhere would require him to move the tanker into position and then reset and reposition—and that would eat up time he really didn’t have. The claw descended to snare the tanker just beneath the first ring of attitude thrusters, and the claws clunked home. The arm began to swing outwards and straighten out. The wrist hyper-extended itself once again to the position the tanker quickly for berthing into the cradle, which rotated around the spindle like the cylinder of a revolver.

  In the cockpit, Samuels monitored the Ulysses's speeding descent and held up two fingers to the module’s cameras.

  Chapter Forty-One

  Just as Odysseus had predicted, Cal hardly had to make any adjustments at all as they entered the area of sheafs of rock and ice that thrust skywards. The rovers entered through a causeway cut into the diagonal shelves to gradually ascend to the rock floor above. His vehicle sped out onto a wide, flat vista overlooking the emptiness, beyond any human corruption of the pristine ice world.

  Donovan’s rovers escorted him out onto the cantilevered plain. Cal glanced out to either side, catching the eye of the other drivers for a second. They each nodded to him and turned their wheels. Just as the bracketing rovers began to peel off and turn, the door to the Donovan’s rover slid open again. He expected Helen. He expected a wave. What he saw was a larger man in a bright yellow spacesuit, aiming something handheld at him. The man’s arm leapt abruptly upwards, and his body disappeared into the interior of the rover. An instant later, something struck the upper corner of his side window, sending spidery cracks through the transparent material and knocking the interior molding from its frame. Under normal circumstances this would have compromised the interior of the rover, but Cal was still wearing his helmet and had never re-pressurized, so it didn’t matter at all. His hand hadn’t moved on the controls. He tabbed comms. “A bullet, Helen? Literal parting shot, huh? Nice.”

  “It wasn’t me, Cal. I didn’t know that would happen.”

  He clicked off the channel. The road into the slag field was approaching.

  Cal’s rover barreled toward the edge. The last fifty to one hundred feet angled upwards, a pattern characteristic of how the slag was deposited. He hit the angle, and the rover was launched into space. Immediately, the vehicle began to rotate end over end. Vibration from the spinning wheels combined with carriage movement were transmitted entirely into the structure of the vehicle, causing it to slowly tumble as it launched its way upwards, arcing out over the basin.

  In the cockpit, Cal’s fingers flew across the touchscreen.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Helen’s rover curved away from the edge, rumbling to a stop. She stepped into the vestibule. Rogers was still on his backside, pistol against the floor. She moved to the open airlock and hopped to the ground below even though the rover was still slowing. She stared out over the angled sheafs of rock. Cal’s rover was tumbling on a great, pathetic arc. She smiled; he was finished. But it was a grand gesture and would indeed be a legendary death. And in no more than a minute or two. Suddenly, the golden bottom section of the rover exploded away from the top. The heavy carriage and the cockpit and pressure vessel continued on in tandem arcs, each continuing to rotate in sync and falling away from one another.

  Helen shook her head. What was happening?

  The golden undercarriage with its struts and barrel wheels continued the rover’s original arcing fall off the cliff. It would impact just over the horizon. The cockpit and pressure vessel kept rotating. When it had rotated to a belly-up position, two of the roof thrusters belched flames and stopped its spin. Staccato bursts from the roof thrusters settled any remaining wobble, and then all four of them fired into life simultaneously and stayed lit. They would burn until their tanks were empty.

  Helen watched in astonishment as the cockpit and pressure vessel of the rover rose up through the thin atmosphere, slowly shrinking into a glittering pinpoint.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Samuels gritted her teeth and stared at the third tanker on both the monitor and as a pinprick through the windows. Again, they were out of position in comparison to the tanker; it was too low this time. Too low for the arm to reach it. In order to use the main engine to slow down and drop lower, she would have to flip the ship. She didn’t want to do that. Didn’t want to lose more altitude that she would have to expend energy to gain back, but if it had to be done, she had to do i
t now. Otherwise, there would just not be enough time to retrieve the tank and get back into position for the next rendezvous.

  A change on the radar window vied for her attention, but she refused to split her focus.

  She decided to gut it out with thrusters, opening up every single one that fired into the ship’s direction of travel. A dozen candle flames erupted from all over Ulysses’s forward surfaces. She prayed she was right in guessing that they could do the job.

  “Paul, you’re going to have to be quick on this one. Our relative speed is going to be high.”

  “Got it,” Arthor replied, sliding the controller around the ring and waiting to spot the tanker as they approached. This one was on the falling end of its parabolic course. They’d be catching up to it, approaching from behind. He would need to let the manipulator traverse the entire length of the tanker. They weren’t going to be able to slow down to match speeds. Not with another tanker out there. And then there was the captain. What were they going to do about him? No doubt the entire crew was wondering the same thing.

  In the command module, Samuels kept the thrusters open as the rocket bell of the tanker slid by the starboard side of the Ulysses’s nose faster than she would have liked. She switched to a rearward camera view and watched the nose end of the tanker shrink on its way down the length of the ship. The arm flexed, and at just the right moment, struck out like a slow-motion viper and clasped its prey’s neck. The tanker rocked on the claw, the engine bell coming frighteningly close to colliding with the ship, but the oscillations ceased as the magnetics clamped down and the arm began to retract and swing down the spindle.