Below Mercury

by Anson, Mark

  Matt’s eyes were clenched shut, and he held his breath against the impact. In his mind’s eye, he could see the undulating surface skimming past just below them, waiting to tear them from the sky.

  At the last moment, Clare pulled hard back on the sidestick, lifting the nose clear of the impact.

  The spaceplane’s main landing gear slammed into the ground and sheared off. It smashed down onto its belly with a bone-jarring crunch that tore off the nose gear, and slid along the crater floor in a shriek of tearing metal. The mission team were thrown about in their seats like dolls as the spaceplane ploughed its way into the dust, ripping its lower fuselage away. A deep boom came from the innards of the ship as the pressurised propellant tanks burst. Something arced briefly behind an instrument panel; there was a loud bang, and the flight deck went dark.

  The ship ground itself deep into the crater floor, dust showering the windows.

  And stopped.

  Outside, the jets were silent, but the dust pattered down like rain, falling in graceful curves in the vacuum. Liquid propane and liquid oxygen gushed from the ruptured propellant tanks, steaming and bubbling in the vacuum.

  The red glow of emergency lighting came on behind the cockpit windows.

  The spaceplane was wrecked, nothing but scrap metal after the crash landing. It lay in the dust of the floor of Chao Meng-fu crater on Mercury, 150 million kilometres from any hope of help.

  They were marooned on Mercury.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Matt’s head was ringing, and his vision had gone cold and distant, as if he was watching the red-lit scene in front of him unfold through someone else’s eyes.

  Clare was running her hands over the overhead console, turning off the fuel pumps, shutting the power down. Wilson was looking back at Matt, shouting something behind the faceplate of his helmet, but Matt couldn’t hear. Why was he angry with him when he needed help?

  Someone grabbed him by the arm and pulled him round, and Bergman’s face came into view. The eyes looked at him for a moment, and then Bergman reached over Matt’s shoulder. Bergman’s mouth moved silently behind his faceplate as he pushed at something.

  ‘—hear us. Matt, can you hear us?’ The words exploded in his ears, and Matt started.

  ‘Yes – I can hear you. I’m okay.’ Matt tried to move, but his suit felt strange round him; it had inflated and stiffened in the vacuum. A thin mist hung in the cabin from the sudden decompression; the ship’s pressure hull must have ruptured in the crash. Matt fought down a sudden rush of panic. They had crashed, they had to get out, they were—

  ‘Okay, can you all hear me now?’ Clare’s voice came over his headset, and suddenly Matt had something to hang on to – a voice, someone who knew what to do. It steadied him. He took a deep breath, and gave Clare a thumbs-up sign.

  ‘Peter? Dr Elliott? You with us?’

  ‘We’re a little shaken up back here, but we’re okay,’ Abrams responded.

  ‘Right, everyone listen carefully. We need to evacuate the ship. You’ve all done this before in training. Disconnect your air hoses first, then release your seat straps and get ready to move. Steve, get the door open, the slide down, and get everyone well away from the ship while I safe all the systems. I’ll follow behind. Quick as you can.’

  Wilson was already out of his seat and moving towards the rear of the cabin. Elliott and Abrams released their straps and got up as soon as Wilson was past, followed by Bergman and Matt, in the evacuation sequence they had practised so many times, but never thought they would be using. Their suits switched over to a self-contained air cylinder the moment they unplugged their air hoses. The cockpit looked strange and alien in the blood-red light; all the colour and familiar shapes had drained away, adding to the sense of unreality.

  ‘Hold on to something, there might be some residual air,’ Wilson cautioned, and pulled the release handle downwards. The door unsealed, and he swung it out and away to one side. The faint mist in the cabin vanished; a scrap of paper blew out of the open doorway, and dropped away outside. The last of their air was gone, and they were in hard vacuum.

  The escape slide tumbled out automatically, unfolding and inflating in the silence of space. Wilson looked out of the empty doorway into the blackness outside.

  ‘Okay, the slide’s inflated. Dr Elliott, you go first. Don’t wait at the bottom of the slide; just get away from the ship. Come on, let’s move it.’

  They slid in turn down the silver fabric of the escape slide, first Elliott, then Abrams, Bergman, Matt, and finally Wilson. As each of them landed, they got up and stepped away from the bottom of the slide, moving carefully in the low gravity after so long in space.

  Matt followed the others away from the ship for maybe twenty metres before he stopped to look back.

  The spaceplane lay half-buried in the dust, tilted onto its left-hand wing. A large section of the centre fuselage had been torn open, and liquid propellants were pouring out into the dust and boiling in the vacuum. A cloud of vapour hung over the scene, spreading outwards as he watched.

  ‘Matt, keep moving!’ Wilson shouted on the radio, ‘Get away from the ship!’

  Matt turned away, and followed Wilson and the others as they walked out into the darkness of the crater floor. One of the ship’s landing lights was still on, and the men’s colossal, stick-like shadows stalked over the ground in front of them. As they walked, the light behind them went out, and was replaced by the bobbing pools of light from their helmet lights. Wilson kept them going for about another hundred metres before he signalled that they could stop and look back.

  The spaceplane lay at the end of a huge furrow that stretched away across the crater floor. A trail of wreckage lay scattered behind the ship; they could just make out the mangled remains of the landing gear, and one of the engine intakes lying nearby.

  ‘Shit,’ someone’s voice whispered over the radio.

  Matt said nothing, but his heart sank as he took in the damage. Clare had managed to absorb some of the energy of the crash by keeping the spaceplane’s nose up as it hit, but it looked as if the cargo hold had been partially crushed. There was no way of telling how much of their supplies had survived until they could go back and investigate.

  As Matt’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, he realised that the crater floor was not completely dark, as it first appeared; a faint, ghostly light illuminated the scene.

  The five men stood on a gently undulating slope at the base of a colossal mountain range, a line of peaks that climbed up out of the crater floor in a succession of huge terraces, receding into the sky. Marching in an unbroken line from one horizon to another, they blocked out the stars as they rose, until their peaks caught the light of the unseen Sun, four kilometres above the crater floor. The reflected light, paler than any moon, filled the interior of the crater with its faint radiance.

  As Matt looked around, he could make out the line of the main access roadway, snaking past them on its way from the landing pad to the mine entrance. The roadway disappeared into the black shadows at the base of the mountains; the feeble light from above could not reach into the Stygian darkness of their hidden valleys. Matt shivered at the thought, and turned back to the crash site in front of him.

  The cloud of vapour from the ruptured propellant tanks was spreading out and falling, glistening in the ghostly light as it froze into billions of tiny crystals. Behind the ship, the crater floor disappeared into the distance, towards the huge, unseen ice field.

  The sound of Matt’s breathing sounded harsh in his ears, and he realised he was hyperventilating. Maybe from the exertion, more than likely from delayed shock. He made a conscious effort to control his breathing, to make it deeper and slower, to conserve his air.

  The others stood close by, staring at the wrecked spacecraft. The depth of their situation was only just sinking in.

  ‘What the hell happened?’ Bergman said at last, breaking the silence.

  ‘I don’t know. Something happened when w
e went to manual control for landing.’ Wilson continued to survey the scene. ‘We’re lucky to be alive after that. If the captain hadn’t got the engines restarted, we’d have made a new crater.’

  ‘Lucky to be alive,’ Elliott muttered under his breath, but they all heard him.

  ‘What’s the captain doing - shouldn’t she get out?’ Abrams asked, ‘The ship’s still leaking fuel.’

  ‘She’s coming now,’ Bergman said. A small figure had appeared at the top of the escape slide, and as they watched, she slid down to the surface, and began walking towards them.

  Behind her, under the wing of the spaceplane, a bright blue light flickered.

  Wilson’s voice yelled in their headsets.

  ‘Captain! There’s a fire! Get away from the ship!’

  Without looking back, Clare broke into a loping run, taking long strides in the low gravity.

  ‘Get down!’ she shouted at them, ‘Get behind some cover!’

  As she ran towards the distant group, over a hundred metres away, she knew she only had seconds. The liquid propane and oxygen leaking from the tanks would not ignite on contact, but something had started the fire, some piece of hot metal or electrical short-circuit, and now the fuel was burning, spreading towards the ruptured tanks. She was moments away from becoming history. She spotted a low hummock in the crater floor just ahead of her.

  ‘I’m going to stop here,’ she gasped, ‘I think there’s a—’

  There was a bright flash from behind her, and she dived forwards. The ground underneath Clare jarred with the sudden shock of an explosion, as the ship’s propellants detonated in a silent fireball of blue light.

  Wilson and the others fell to the ground, sprawling in the dust. The light from the explosion burst over them, and smaller thuds echoed through the ground as some of the demolition charges went off.

  The light flickered and faded. Several seconds passed. Bergman looked up.

  ‘Keep your heads down! The debris is coming!’ Wilson yelled.

  As he said the words, something heavy fell in front of Abrams, shaking the ground. A piece of titanium wing spar whirled over Matt’s head, barely a metre away, and cartwheeled to a halt close by in a shower of dust.

  ‘Shit!’ Matt gasped. He shrank back as an even bigger piece of the wing landed, piling up the ground next to him. He squirmed behind it for some extra shelter, trying to make himself as small as possible. The intense cold of the surface clawed at him through the layers of the suit, sucking his body heat out into the ground.

  Bergman cringed as a shower of small, hard objects fell on and around him. He expected the end any moment, as something big and jagged tore into his suit or smashed his helmet open. He opened his eyes and saw that the objects were frozen meal packs, and he was struck by the absurdity of being killed by flying food.

  The thudding continued around them, but the objects gradually became smaller and less frequent, until it was just a rain of fine particles sifting down on them.

  ‘Okay, sound off, who’s there?’ Wilson demanded at last, raising his head and looking round.

  ‘Bergman here, I’m okay.’

  ‘Crawford.’

  ‘Elliott.’

  ‘Abrams here. I’ve got a flashing amber light in my helmet, does that mean my suit’s holed?’ His voice held a trace of alarm.

  Wilson got up and went across to him quickly, and motioned for Abrams to stand up. Wilson held the older man’s shoulder firmly with one hand, and smacked the suit faceplate with the flat of his other hand.

  The light inside Abrams’s helmet went out.

  ‘Faceplate seal,’ Wilson said, ‘they do that sometimes if they’re not fastened down tight.’

  Abrams nodded his thanks, and they turned to face the wreck of the ship.

  The fuel was still burning, but the fierce blue flames had faded to a sullen orange, as the materials and structure of the spaceplane burned in what was left of the oxygen. The fire had an ethereal quality, wavering and blowing in vacuum as the last few kilos of oxygen boiled away. As they watched, the pale flames wavered, went out briefly, flickered back, then were gone, and the ship could be seen as an eerie skeleton of red-hot ribs and spars, glowing in the darkness.

  Nobody spoke as they watched the glowing remains of the ship. A part of the fuselage collapsed in on itself, falling to the ground in a shower of sparks.

  ‘Captain, are you okay?’ Wilson looked over to where Clare was standing some distance away, watching the ship.

  ‘I’m okay.’ Clare raised a hand. Her voice sounded a little unsteady. She stood there for several moments, before turning and walking over to where the others waited.

  ‘Right, we’ve got to get some more air,’ Clare said, her face impassive. ‘Matt, you know this place better than any of us. We need some ideas, and fast.’ She looked hard at him, getting him to focus.

  Matt tore his eyes away from the ship.

  ‘Uh – there might be some air cylinders around here, in the debris field. There were some stored in the main hangar for the surface workers.’

  ‘Where’s the best place to start?’

  ‘I – think we should spread out and work our way back through the debris field, towards the main mine portal.’ He indicated the base of the nearby mountains.

  Clare looked round at the group, her helmeted head swivelling from side to side. If she felt a rising panic at the desperate situation they were in, she didn’t show it.

  ‘Any other suggestions? Okay, let’s do it. Line abreast, five metres apart, and advance towards the mine entrance. Steve, you lead off in the centre, the rest of you, follow to either side.’

  They set off, spreading out over the ground as they moved along, heads down as they searched for anything that looked like an air cylinder. The crash had taken them towards the mountains and the mine entrance, and they could see the access roadway on their right, snaking across the rising ground before it disappeared into the permanent darkness at the foot of the mountains. Wilson angled their route towards it as they searched the ground.

  Clare moved to the left, out past Bergman, to make a wider search front. She tried not to look at her air gauge. With the ship gone, the only air they had was the emergency cylinders built in the suits; they weren’t designed to provide more than forty-five minutes of air at best.

  She was also getting cold. Although the escape suits were insulated, they were unheated, and could not protect against the deep cold of the crater for very long. She had to keep everyone moving to keep them warm, and that just used up their air even faster.

  Over to the right of the search line, Matt strode across the surface, inspecting anything he came across. He had rarely been on the surface when he had worked here; most of his work had been deep inside the mine, and he had only been out here when they needed to inspect the surface facilities. He could feel the ground crunching under his boots as he walked; the dust was coated in a faint hoarfrost of sublimated ice from the great ice field out on the crater floor. It sparkled in his helmet lights as he walked.

  A little further on, he encountered the edge of the roadway; a metre-high embankment of compacted regolith, surfaced in vacuum-setting concrete. He strode up the embankment and stood on the ridged surface of the roadway, and set off along it as it plunged into the shadow of the mountains, the other searchers strung out on his left. A second darkness fell around them, and now there was only the light from their helmets to guide them in the blackness.

  All around them now, as they drew closer to the mine portal, the signs of explosion, of ruin, and the death of a mine, became more frequent. A thin layer of grey dust, blown out from the mine, overlaid the darker dust of the crater floor. Scraps of paper, torn from desks, mingled with unidentified pieces of broken and twisted metal.

  Clare kicked her way through the debris, looking for anything that looked like an air cylinder. More paper. A miner’s helmet. Plastic cups. Clothing. A piece of instrument panel from the console of some vehicle. A body.
<
br />   A body.

  ‘Hey guys, I’ve found something,’ Clare said, in a neutral voice.

  Elliott was nearest to her and stopped as he saw the body. It was in a spacesuit, lying face down in the dust, one leg twisted in a way that nature never intended.

  ‘Oh shit,’ Elliott breathed.

  ‘Help me see if there’s any air in the backpack, will you?’ Clare talked swiftly as she knelt down beside the body. It had frozen rigid in its final pose, one arm flung out, and Elliott had to help her turn it over. ‘That’s it, I can hold it there. Can you see the gauges?’

  ‘Yeah, I’ve got it, it’s reading empty, it must have – oh Jesus fucking Christ!’

  Elliott recoiled from the body and stood up. Too fast, and he fell over backwards in the low gravity, his arms flailing as he tried to regain his balance. His breath came in short, panicked gasps.

  Clare glanced down.

  For an instant, she saw what was behind the faceplate. The suit was intact, and had kept the decomposing corpse supplied with air and warmth until the backpack ran out. The ghastly ruins of the face leered at her through a veil of frost. With a shudder of revulsion, she let the body fall back, and stood up as fast as she dared in the low gravity.

  ‘Okay, resume the search. No air here.’ She tried to speak calmly, but a wave of nausea rose up, and she took several breaths with her radio muted. Bergman was helping Elliott up. Clare glanced to make sure Elliott hadn’t vomited in his helmet, and carried on. Keep everyone moving, she thought, we don’t have much time.

  Ahead of them in the darkness, the roadway turned into a deep cutting in the mountainside. Over forty metres wide, the cutting plunged straight and level into the mountain, its sloping walls rising on either side, until it ended in a sheer vertical wall. This was the main portal to Erebus Mine. With nothing further left to search, the group mounted the edge of the concrete roadway and joined Matt. As they advanced, the sweeping beams of their helmet lights illuminated more wreckage, scattered across the floor of the cutting.