Wine Dark Deep: Book One

by R. Peter Keith

  “Whaddya call that one, Chief?” Samuels asked with enthusiasm.

  “I call that scary.”

  One blip remained on the radar screen. One blip and the static.

  Samuels laughed. Three.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Cal unlatched his restraints and pushed himself out of his now upside-down seat. Not that up and down really mattered much in the weak and ever dwindling gravity. Through the windshield and the roof ports, he could see the blue, white, and gray details of the planetoid passing by in dizzying streaks. He twisted himself around the cockpit and was about to push off into the rover’s midsection when he saw a briefcase nestled into a matching niche in the sidewall. It looked important. On impulse, he reached out and took it. If he was desperate, he could throw it as reaction mass. He cranked open the side airlock door and, holding onto the safety railing, looked out.

  He saw the tanker first. It seemed as if it was a fluttering shape just a few dozen feet away. He knew that it wasn’t. It was much larger than it seemed, and this far away, Ceres’s faint atmosphere played tricks on the eyes.

  The tanker was growing smaller by the second, but the rover’s roof thrusters were still blasting away below him. Beyond what he thought was the tanker, even further away, seemingly halfway across the sky, sparkled another distant and smaller object. A bright star that must be the Ulysses. He ducked his head back inside and looked for a tether. In any space vehicle, there should be tethers to attach a suit hardpoint to a safety railing. There should be but there weren’t.

  Cal took a deep breath, connected the briefcase to a rung on the bottom of his backpack, and reached out the airlock for the safety railing.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  “Oh no.” The doc saw it first. The fourth tanker. “Paul,” she said. Arthor followed her gaze out the window ports. The doctor tabbed her communications channel and called the command module. “Sarah, do you see this?”

  Samuels saw it. The low resistance of Ceres’s nearly non-existent atmosphere hadn’t appreciably changed tanker four’s parabolic path, but it had somehow set the tanker on a spin rotating around its center point.

  “Xu?” she asked.

  Zuoren drifted forward from the larger monitors of his research station and pulled himself into the right-hand seat. He stared at the spiraling tanker for a moment and then spoke. “Too dangerous. If we miss, it could fly off and cripple the ship. We have three tankers. We can fly a reduced mission and make it home. Abort the retrieval.”

  Over the communications channel, Arthor shouted at all of them, “We can do it.”

  “It’s too dangerous, Paul.”

  “Listen. We can do it. Sarah, just keep the habitats out of the way and the ship parallel to the tanker’s spin. I’ll keep the arm fully extended and match the claw’s rotation to the speed of the spin. You’ll just have to nudge us in close with thrusters.”

  Zuoren looked at Samuels. Even with the multicolored reflections of the controls streaked across the dome of her helmet, he could clearly see the intensity and confidence in her eyes.

  “We can do it,” she agreed.

  Xu Zuoren look down at the engineer’s face on the screen and said, “Then do it.”

  Immediately, Samuels began tabbing through her menus and twisting the control stick. Bursts of thrusters carefully aligned the long axis of the Ulysses with that of the spinning tank. Another set of thruster rings lit up to roll the ship and stop it so that the skeletal arm’s shoulder mount directly faced the tanker’s position. The arm raised up, pulling away from the flank of the ship, and pointed directly toward the pinwheeling tanker.

  In the docking ring, Arthor slid the control panel around to afford himself the best view and then shifted his attention to the screen on the control panel.

  “Odysseus, give me the feed from the camera on the manipulator.”

  The screen opened a view on the spinning tanker from a camera mounted in the claw’s “palm,” between the magnetic claws. Arthor began to twist a dial, and the doc could see the grasping device itself start to spin in the same direction as the tanker. On Arthor’s screen, the effect was that the tanker’s spin appeared as if it were slowing down. Slowing and stopping. Out the window, the claws were spinning around in perfect sync with the tanker.

  “Sarah, bring us in closer.”

  Up in the command module, the pilot made the barest of movements with her wrist, and the thrusters coughed and coughed again.

  “Little closer.”

  The manipulator slid into the recessed capture points and the magnets pulled the tanker in tight.

  Arthor began to dial down the rotation of the claw, slowing the spin of the refueling tanker.

  Samuels smiled over at Zuoren and held up four fingers.

  “Not yet.”

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Cal scrambled out the side airlock and pulled himself over onto the rover’s skyward underside, grasping hardpoints that formerly clasped the jettisoned undercarriage. He wasn’t about to sit inside and wait. Unable to contact the Ulysses, he had no real reason to think they would even think to rescue him, and if they did, he was unwilling to have them try to grab the rover’s pressure vessel. It wasn’t designed for it and could put the Ulysses at risk. Besides, his mass was far less than that of the rover. He pulled himself carefully to the center of the pressure vessel, braced his legs against two empty connectors and gripped the structure as best as he could. Above him, the sparkling blackness and that shining star that had no choice but to carry his hopes.

  In the main window of her controls screen, the arm’s wrist flexed and began to swing the tanker parallel to its length. Pilot Samuels finally remembered the radar display. The additional radar junk she had noticed earlier had not evaporated. It had solidified.

  “Xu, something else is down there. Very small, rising from the surface, like it was trying to follow the flight paths of the tankers.”

  Zuoren leaned, squinting at his displays, and scrolled the telescope window.

  “A missile?” Arthor asked over the comms.

  “Unknown.”

  “Lander?”

  “I can’t be certain yet, Navigator. The radar profile is . . . indistinct.”

  “It’s Cal,” Samuels said.

  “What?”

  Zuoren’s telescope window scrolled and locked onto the object, zooming in. “It appears to be a rover.”

  “What?”

  “It’s Cal, it’s gotta be Cal.”

  “Prepare for rendezvous!”

  Zuoren began sliding figures and measurements from his half of the controls screen to Samuels’ pilot’s station. He tabbed the comms to the docking ring.

  “Paul, I need you to finish berthing that tanker as quickly as possible and reset the arm for another retrieval.”

  “Roger that, but . . . if that’s Cal out there . . .”

  “We are going to treat this just like we did the tankers.”

  “I’ve never berthed a rover, Xu.”

  “We’d never berthed unpowered tankers less than fifty miles from an asteroid before either, but we kept calm and got the job done.”

  “I hear you,” Paul said. The doc floated up behind him and laid a calming hand on the engineer’s giant heaving back. He resumed the tanker retrieval, repeating the same motions that would, for a final time, swing the tanker along the long arc that would make final positioning of the tank in the cradle a magnetic formality. A quarter of its way through its arc, the arm shuddered and stopped—and then leaped forward to abruptly halt again. Arthor and the doc both let out a near identical shriek. The tanker bobbled and wallowed in its orbit, straining in the grasp of the manipulator claws. With a jolt, it started to move again, and the tanker slammed home into the berthing clamps of the cradle. Everyone in the ship reflexively tightened their stomachs, but the tanker latched and all of the connection lights went green.

  “I can’t promise the skin of that tanker isn’t creased,” Arthor wheezed.


  “What happened down there?” the first officer asked.

  “Not sure, but something’s wrong. There’s a lag in the response. Might be a potentiometer going bad in the controls or something in the shoulder joint unit. No response through about twenty percent of the X-axis range.”

  “And just in X?”

  “Yeah. One second the arm thinks it’s at about twenty degrees, and then all of a sudden it’s reading forty and it jerks into motion.”

  “That does sound like a bad pot.”

  “And on the very last tank.”

  “Last tank. Yeah.” Arthor unlatched the control panel from the front rail and flipped it up toward the wall. “Doc, get me the tool kit right behind you.”

  The doctor retrieved the little briefcase from its wall niche and floated over to the control panel, opened it, and presented an array of tools to the ship’s engineer.

  Arthor picked up a small security torx and looked at the radar display and then out the little ports ringing the room. He felt the increased vibrations from the cooling plant as reactor power was amped up. Valves to the propellant tanks would be opening up. Liquid hydrogen would be flowing, electrical power spooling up to convert all that hydrogen into plasma.

  “How are we going to pull this off?”

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  The setting was so incongruous. A perfect bowl of night. Stars in incalculable number shining through luminous sheets of galactic material. A trillion stars. Maybe a trillion upon a trillion other lives out there. Or none. It was awe-inspiring and beautiful, and Cal was viewing it all perched on the bottom of the rover’s cockpit. He had relaxed; there was no wind or other motion that was going to send him flying. He was sitting on the belly of a machine and flying off into space.

  Blotting out more and more stars as it dropped down out of the sky, its habitats retracted as an ancient ship of exploration had once furled its sails heading into a storm, the Ulysses grew larger, approaching him. He was surprised by the size of it. They were miles up but the ship seemed so near that it was frightening, as if it could just plummet at any second. Intellectually, he knew how nonexistent Ceres’s atmosphere was, and the weakness of its gravity had been underscored in every movement since he had arrived, and yet his mind refused to accept how it could be possible.

  He understood the physics of what was happening. In fact, he was betting his life on it, but he was still dumbfounded by the sight of it. He was moving at hundreds of miles per hour, Ulysses undoubtedly more, and yet it seemed as if it were slowly moving over him.

  In the command module, Samuels glanced over at Xu Zuoren. They could both see what was happening. Ulysses’s parabolic flight was nearing the point where it must begin to arc upwards and away from the planet in order to avoid being unable to regain orbit—and Cal’s rover was at the point where it’s parabola was going to start to heel over and curve back down toward the planet. The arm was frozen and immobile, lying flat against the hull. As things stood, Cal would be just out of reach.

  At opposite ends of the interplanetary ship, thruster rings fired in opposite directions. The giant vessel spun around its center, pinwheeling like the tanker had been pinwheeling. The vessel hadn’t altered its orbit; it had just changed its orientation within that orbit. The docking ring and frozen arm were now one hundred and twenty-three feet closer to Cal than they had been before.

  “Paul, I need thirty-two seconds to reorient for the burn that we need to make no later than six minutes from now.”

  Arthor struggled with the disassembled control panel. The bottom of the panel floated nearby, held by its grounding tether. The joystick was open at its base, and he worked to replace the potentiometer.

  The stricken robotic arm was still flat against the sides of the tankers in the cradle. Against her better judgement, Samuels nudged the ship using the thrusters, bringing it closer to the rover cockpit, at the same time increasing the amount of fuel they’d need to expend in order to escape. Worse, she was further endangering the ship. The rover’s cockpit and pressure vessel were, in reality, a kinetic energy weapon—a knife composed of steel, plastic, and potential energy. A blade poised at the ship’s neck.

  Cal clambered around the rover’s exterior and stood up on its belly. He reached up, slowly waving his arms. The vehicles closed to within sixty, maybe seventy feet.

  “Forget it!” Doc yelled. “It’ll take too long! Tell Samuels to fly closer!”

  “I’ve got it!” Arthor didn’t bother with solder. He shoved the potentiometer shaft into the housing and twisted the wires around its posts. He held the two halves of the joystick in place solely with his pressure of his grip and slid the control panel back down and in place. The panel came alive even though the bottom panel was still loose and bobbing on its grounding wire. The doc pushed herself over to the window and watched the shoulder joint swing smoothly through its arc and extend the arm toward the rover’s slowly turning pressure vessel. “It’s not calibrated. This could be a little rough!” He called into the comms channel.

  At the end of its arc, the arm stopped suddenly, just short of full extension, and vibrated through its axis. Cal leapt for the swinging arm, feeling the joint of the wrist slide through his grasp, hitting the heavy manipulator and bouncing off.

  The stars spun in the bowl of Cal’s helmet. A strange sensation passed through him as the magnetics turned on. His suit and backpack were plastic and plastic-coated fabric—but you couldn’t replace the resiliency of metal for gas storage, and so the tanks inside were attracted to the manipulator’s powerful electromagnets. The backpack slowed and was drawn up against the claws. Cal grabbed for the shaft of the arm and locked his arms and legs around it. As the arm began to fold inward against the long axis of the ship, the gigantic main engine erupted into thrust. Beyond the curve of the engine bell, a nova flared into existence. Cal just closed his eyes and held on tight.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  On the surface, looking upwards through the rover’s window ports, Helen Donovan watched the falling star of the Ulysses continue to fall in the wrong direction—up.

  To be continued in: Wine Dark Deep Two—Encounter at Jupiter

  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08BVV9M82