Synopsis

When the solar system’s key asteroid mine is seized by revolutionaries, it puts the secret mission of the spaceship Ulysses in jeopardy. Without a refueling launch from the asteroid, the survival of the ship and its crew is uncertain. The safest course for the Ulysses? Abandon the mission and limp home.

But Cal Scott, captain of the Ulysses, is an astronaut of the old school and failure is not an option. He has a plan: head straight for the asteroid belt and get their fuel—one way or another.

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Excerpt

[The Lander] was still, essentially, in the same two-hundred-and-fifty-mile-high, perfectly circular orbit the Ulysses had occupied since grabbing the taxi. He slid his fingers over a disc-shaped control on his touchscreen; it spun like a platter. Reaction control thrusters outside the craft pitched the vehicle so that the taxi’s back faced down toward the asteroid and its engines aimed at its direction of travel. His fingers twirled a second disc; horizontally placed thrusters flared to roll the ship over so that the planetoid below appeared in its viewport. Opposing thrusters belched quickly to stop the roll at the right moment.

“Go for transfer burn, Cal.”

Cal slid the thrust tab all the way forward. Bright blue-yellow cones of flame burst from the twin engines, slowing the taxi lander. He held the slider in position as the mission timer clicked away.

The taxi was, second by second, shedding horizontal speed and falling deeper into Ceres’s gravity, dropping faster and faster. Its orbit had gone from perfectly circular to an exaggerated ellipse that would bring it down to just fifty thousand feet above the ground on exactly the opposite side of the planetoid from where the burn had begun. If he did nothing, the little taxi would loop back up around Ceres, returning to its apogee two hundred and fifty miles above.

Cal had half an orbit to think. He didn’t relish the time, but the lander’s descent path would give him a better look at the icy, dusty treasure house of an asteroid. Ceres was the largest body in an asteroid belt made up of millions of rocky objects. The planetoid made up over a third of the entire belt’s mass and a good amount of it was in the form of water ice. Every now and then, due to an odd combination of forces, a geyser of sublimated water vapor would spew out of the little world. Ice volcanoes. As such, Ceres had its own faint atmosphere, and it lent it an air of mystery: a tenuously shrouded and misty sphere against a backdrop of endless clarity.

Dropping down below one hundred miles a shattered area, appearing to be made up of great crusts of ice and clay heaved over one another, spread out beneath him. Another quarter way around the small globe and he would reach the low point in the transfer orbit. That would be the time to initiate descent. Looking over the taxi’s systems, he thought he caught a sparkling reflection in his viewport: an object rising from the surface? He looked again but could see nothing. He checked for a record of it on the scopes but could find no trace. Paranoia?

The taxi lander swept down, approaching the low point—the nadir—of its orbit. Cal’s fingers hovered over the control screen. There would be a nearly endless number of repeat tries if he missed. The lander would stay in its transfer orbit, shifting between the high point of the parking orbit and the fifty-thousand-foot low, but Cal wasn’t about to miss the moment, and he had a sneaking suspicion that Odysseus would fire the engines if he failed to act, even though he had asked it not to.

Right at fifty thousand feet, he ramped the thrust up to full, and the lander shed enough of its remaining momentum that Ceres’s gravity had it. There was nothing that was going to keep it from falling to the planetoid. There just wasn’t enough fuel remaining in its tanks to put it back into orbit. Technically, all paths in space were orbits; this new one the taxi was falling along just happened to intersect with the ground.

Now, Cal thought, it was all about mitigating the fall.

About the Author

R. Peter Keith grew up on a steady diet of classic science fiction—Arthur C. Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein, Farmer—and Marvel comics. He went to the Joe Kubert school of cartoon art during his teenage years, received a degree in psychology, and then started a museum exhibit and games company. He is a recognized expert on the history of video games, having worked as an advisor for recognized entities like the U.S. Post Office, History Channel, Microsoft, AMD, and Digital Eclipse. In this capacity he has appeared as a commentator and interviewee on CBS This Morning, CNN, CNBC, and others. He appeared in the CNBC documentary Game On, as well as History Channel’s Modern Marvels.

In 2008, he designed and produced the largest and most complex restoration of an extinct ecosystem for a museum exhibit, bringing back to life over 2.2 square miles of late Cretaceous Wyoming complete with accurately simulated animals, insects, and plants with proper dispersal and nutritional values. The animals could hunt and track visitors via sight and sound and what is called “digital scent.”

In 2015, an exhibit Keith designed and produced broke all attendance records at its debut at Space Center Houston, NASA Johnson Space Center’s official visitor center, and because of its success his company was awarded a NASA Space Act Agreement Partnership. During the research and creation of this exhibition, which simulates space flight and landings on multiple moons and worlds in the solar system, Keith spent hours upon hours discussing space with the greatest minds at NASA. He visited the astronaut training center, spending time in and out of various spacecraft, including time in the Orion Space Capsule with one of its designers. He piloted the Lunar Lander simulator at NASA’s Langley Research center and spent months of accumulated time within a simulation of the lunar surface accurate down to a scale of 1 foot. This experience inspired the idea for Wine Dark Deep.

R. Peter Keith is married with two kids, two rescue dogs, and two vintage sports cars that he calls his “steel brothers.”

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